Technology has had a significant impact on healthcare today. In the present healthcare system, healthcare departments and staffs find it easy to connect and ethically share health data faster and in an effective way. As a result, the incorporation of health informatics saves time and cost, in addition to improving the quality of healthcare. But where did all these start? Tracing down the history and the evaluation of the health informatics showcase a discipline that had a glittering start despite numerous challenges that were on the way. It all began when computers came to be, and since then, health informatics is one of the disciplines in the healthcare sector that has a promising future. The evolution of health informatics as a discipline is traceable by looking at the evolution in its education and different organization that came together to set the standard of practice in the discipline, as shall be discussed in this article.
Hsueh et al. (2017) define health informatics as an “an interdisciplinary professional specialty and scientific discipline that integrates the health sciences, computer science, and information science, as well as many other analytic sciences, to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in the provision of healthcare for individuals, families, groups, and communities” (171). From the definition, the core of health informatics is the integration of technology and analytical knowledge to solve pertinent healthcare questions. The field of health informatics came to be after the invention of computers. Though it existed for sometimes, the discipline had to wait until computer technology was ripe to manage a significant quantity of data. Despite several attempts to a breakthrough in the field of medicine and health, time was not ripe for this discipline until 1960 was when different organizations penned down standards for study in the field. The drivers were the need to provide better care for the society. In Proverbs, the Bible emphasizes the need to have better health by claiming that, “ A joyful heart is a good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones" (Proverbs 17:22). By this time, the emphasis was on the provision of quality health, and health informatics was vital to healthcare because it brought different aspects of strategies achieving quality in healthcare. T hey include but are not limited to the use of electronic health records, electronically submitting prescriptions and various other health information technology systems.
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According to a report by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), it was the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) that came up with the first reporting standards for practice. It was also during this time that the term informatics originates in France. Currently, many organizations have set the standard for practices such as American Nursing Associations ( Deserno, 2017). The marketing of this course begun in most countries, where it was known with numerous journals on this discipline becoming known. The first of such journal was indexed in MEDLINE and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) in 1986. The first professional informatics body was started in 1949, before computers which were known as bioengineering. It was under the management of Gustav Wagner and was established in Germany ( Wang et al., 2017). Following its establishment, the ideas spread, and what followed was various health informatics groups at the local, national, and international levels to set the pace for study in this field. Currently, The American Medical Association (AMA), American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) are an organization that educates and relies on health informatics professionals ( Bakken, 2019). Currently, all these organizations participate in reforming the educational curriculum, setting the standard for practice, and also take part in ion enhancing the regress of the field. With the advance in technology and new inventions in the field of medicine and technology, health informatics has a promising future in the health sector.
References
Bakken, S. (2019). The importance of consumer-and patient-oriented perspectives in biomedical and health informatics. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , 26 (7), 583-584.
Deserno, T. M. (2017). Health Informatics for Research Applications of CAD. In Medical Image Analysis and Informatics (pp. 491-504). CRC Press.
Hsueh, P. Y., Cheung, Y. K., Dey, S., Kim, K. K., Martin-Sanchez, F. J., Petersen, S. K., & Wetter, T. (2017). Added value from secondary use of person-generated health data in consumer health informatics. Yearbook of medical informatics , 26 (01), 160-171.
Wang, K. H., Marenco, L., Madera, J. E., Aminawung, J. A., Wang, E. A., & Cheung, K. H. (2017). Using a community-engaged health informatics approach to develop a web analytics research platform for sharing data with community stakeholders. In AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings (Vol. 2017, p. 1715). American Medical Informatics Association.
