A Brief History of Clinical Informatics

A (Very Brief) History of EHRs

“Our goal was to solve three problems: (1) to eliminate the logistical problems of the paper records by making clinical data immediately available to authorized users wherever they are – no more unavailable or undecipherable clinical records; (2) to reduce the work of clinical book keeping required to manage patients – no more missed diagnoses when laboratory evidence shouts its existence, no more forgetting about required preventive care; (3) to make the informational ‘gold’ in the medical record accessible to clinical, epidemiological, outcomes and management research.”

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The Introduction of Clinical Decision Support

 The Birth of Professional Informatics Associations

American Medical Informatics Association

• American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics
• American College of Medical Informatics
• Symposium on Computer Applications and Medical Care

The Evolution of Clinical Informatics as a Subspecialty

Where Will the Future of Informatics Be?

• Machine learning and natural language processing is helping us wrap our mind around impossibly large sets of data and extract usable pieces of knowledge. Startups like lumiata, clinigence, AgileMD and Zipnosis are working to improve the ways we do this through better access to and analysis of healthcare data. Whether these will eventually replace tasks of health care providers (or even their jobs) is the big question. Don't believe it? Check out this article from the economist. It will get you thinking.
• HITECH, Meaningful Use, the HIPAA privacy and security rules, and the Affordable Care Act have rapidly accelerated the adoption of health IT.
• The clinical informatics subspecialty teaches physicians to lead organizations through massive IT and organizational change,  mine data from EHRs and other clinical information systems to find previously undiscovered correlations, or develop systems to improve the accessibility and affordability of health care to patients around the globe.

References:

Electronic health records overview.

www.himss.org

Journal of AHIMA