Like many other areas of our lives, the healthcare industry is being transformed by the power of big data and the information technology revolution. The discipline of health informatics exists squarely at the center of this macro trend, harnessing vast data streams from sources including online healthcare portals, electronic medical records, bioinformatics from wearable devices and other digital data collection tools, and more. And, as we are seeing from the COVID-19 pandemic, the proper analysis of this data is essential to understanding the spread of illnesses and helping to prepare healthcare systems for their impacts.
Practitioners in health informatics use techniques from computer science, information science, and cognitive science to collect, manage, and analyze all of this health data. The goal is to help healthcare science practitioners conduct critical research, deliver better outcomes for patients, and protect public health more effectively. There are further specializations within health informatics that focus on specific areas; for instance, nursing informatics focuses more specifically on the collection and use of data relating to the role of nurses in the healthcare setting.
Regardless of the focus of a career in the realm of health informatics, professionals in this field play a critical role in the advancement of healthcare - particularly in the midst of a crisis like COVID-19. The insights provided by health informatics are central to the analysis of global pandemics as well as the development of new approaches to healthcare provision, which offer the potential to deliver breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of novel illnesses like COVID-19 as well as genetic disorders, cancers, and other challenging diseases.