Typically, only 30 percent of a physician's information needs are met in the course of office practice.
Family physicians have an average of seven clinically important, unanswered questions each day.
The skills needed to acquire this knowledge are essential to lifelong learning. As a corollary, the ability to evaluate and improve one's clinical performance is an essential element of quality improvement. Medical informatics, while variably defined, is most simply the study of biomedical information and its use in decision making. It comprises the effective acquisition, distillation, interpretation, application and communication of information. In addition to the more traditional sources of information, computers now represent one increasingly important tool in managing information.