Medical Informatics as a Scientific Discipline

Abstract

This chapter will provide a brief history of the birth and development of medical informatics, followed by a description of its principal domains. These domains include bioinformatics, which relates to molecular and cellular aspects of medicine, clinical informatics, which deals with patient data and medical knowledge relating to the care of individual patients, and public health informatics, which brings together the tools, techniques and applications for reasoning at the population level. Links with other disciplines, including subdisciplines of computer sciences, biostatistics and biomedical engineering, have also been developed. There are many scientific societies for medical informatics, operating at the national, continental and international levels. These societies are presented here, together with the principal journals, scientific conferences and exhibitions in this field.