Basic concepts in medical informatics

摘要

Medical informatics is the study and appli-cation of methods to improve the man-agement of patient data, clinical knowledge, population data, and other information relevant to patient care and community health. It is a young science, which emerged in the decades after the invention of the digital computer in the 1940s. Mechanical computing in medicine had a much earlier origin, in the 19th century, with Herman Hollerith's "punched-card data-processing system" originally used for the US census and subsequently developed to support surveys in public health and epidemiology. This example reflects the multidisciplinary nature of medical informatics, which interacts with various fields, including the clinical sciences, the public health sciences (for example, epidemiology and health services research) as well as cognitive, computing, and information sciences.