Health care informatics

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Health care informatics has been defined as:

"A field of study concerned with the broad range of issues in the management and use of biomedical information, including medical computing and the study of the nature of medical information itself." - Shortliffe EH, Perreault LE, eds. Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine. New York: Springer, 2001.

"If physiology literally means ‘the logic of life’, and pathology is ‘the logic of disease’, then health informatics is the logic of healthcare. It is the rational study of the way we think about patients, and the way that treatments are defined, selected and evolved. It is the study of how clinical knowledge is created, shaped, shared and applied. Ultimately, it is the study of how we organize ourselves to create and run healthcare organizations." - Coiera E. Guide to Health Informatics. London:Hodder, 2003.

"The science that studies the use and processing of data, information, and knowledge applied to medicine, health care and public health." - van Bemmel JH, Musen MA, eds. Handbook of Medical Informatics. AW Houten, Netherlands: Bohn Stafleu Van Loghum; Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag, 1997.