An introduction into medical informatics is given by 10 lectures and two practical training sessions. Basic concepts of using computers are addressed and the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of medical information is discussed. For education and training in medical informatics, the scheme above plays a piviotal role. It is also part of the new Handbook of Medical Informatics . A patient or a biological process generates data that are observed by the clinician.
Information is derived from the data by interpretation, which is fed back to the clinician.
By inductive reasoning with the interpreted data, collected from many similar patients or processes, new knowledge is obtained, which is added to the body of knowledge in medicine. This knowledge is used for the interpretation of other data. The figure illustrates the coherence between data, information and knowledge in health care. The second year deals with computer - assisted decision making . The third year deals with the current practice of medical information systems and consists of two lectures and two practical training sessions.