If you haven't read the "About Me" page of this blog, I am a Registered Nutritionist-Dietitian in the Philippines, studying Master of Science in Public Health focusing on Nutrition so expect my approach in my blogs to be related to my profession and study.
I am currently enrolled in Health Informatics 201 as a cognate for my graduate study.
In our second week in this class, the term Biomedical Informatics was introduced. Biomedical Informatics is a multi-faceted discipline combining different component scientific fields including Biological and Physical Sciences, Mathematical, Statistical and Decision Sciences, Information and Communication Science, Computer Science, Cognitive and Social Sciences/Humanities, and Engineering. As this line of studies is relatively new, professionals and students who specialize in Biomedical Informatics have a set of competencies that are expected to possess as approved by the AMIA Academic Forum in 2010. This includes 1) fundamental scientific skills which are mainly concerned on an individual's ability to analyze problems and provide innovative solutions; 2) scope and breadth of discipline which is basically understanding the biological, biomedical, and population health concepts; 3) theory and methodology are competencies involved in understanding and developing theories, methods and processes in the concept of biomedical informatics; 4) technological approach are competencies related to application of technology in biomedicine; and 5) understanding the population and the users to be able to design solutions to biomedicine problems that fits the social and ethical context of the population.
In the aspect of Education, Research and Development, Biomedical Informatics is responsible for development of methods, techniques and theories to be applied in different levels of biomedicine starting from the molecular and cellular level in Bioinformatics, tissue- and organ-level in Imaging Informatics, and Health Informatics which is further divided into two: Clinical Informatics which focuses on individual/patient-level, and Public Health Informatics which is concerned with the population. With this, there is a synergistic relationship between the academe, research institute and corporate researchers, and health informatics as the researchers are responsible for the development of methods, techniques and theories which could be employed at the hospitals, medical institutions. At the same time, problems in the medical institutions inspire the development of the said tools and techniques.
Biomedical Informatics is relevant today because: 1) the future of medicine and healthcare is expected to change and we need the statistics to understand data from huge populations and long time duration; 2) we now have modern tools available that enable large-scale assessments or data-processing; 3) it is essential to medical and non-medical fields such as government and industries. To put it in a public health perspective, tools or systems developed by Biomedical Informaticians may impact different sectors such as health professionals being able to reach out to more patients through telemedicine in rural health units especially in GIDAs where health professionals are lacking, and the citizens will be given access on quality healthcare. Government on the other hand, has an essential role as they both participate in investment to biomedical researches and in prioritization for budget. With growing knowledge on genetic associations with illnesses, identifiable ‘‘at risk’’ group will increase, identifying more asymptomatic citizens and increasing the demands on health-care systems, which could help provide knowledge to the legislative leaders to prioritize healthcare in budgeting. Lastly, this could help in preventing data errors, and providing health information system in the country to have a reliable health data at all times. These expected impacts has inspired me to enroll in HI 201 as I think a systemic change in the health sector could be one of the probable solutions in solving various health problems in the country.
Sources:
AMIA slide deck. Biomedical Informatics
F. Martin-Sanchez et al. Synergy between medical informatics and bioinformatics: facilitating genomic medicine for future health care. Journal of Biomedical Informatics 37 (2004) 30–42.
Kulikowski CA et al. AMIA Board white paper: definition of biomedical informatics and specification of core competencies for graduate education in the discipline. JAMIA 2012;19(6):931-938.
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