In this issue - Making sense of taxonomies in health informatics

Abstract

This issue of the journal starts with a leading article about the tangled taxonomies within our discipline. 1 In this issue explores this further, looking at how a clear taxonomy for our discipline might improve our understanding of what is and, perhaps more importantly, is not part of health informatics.Taxonomies, the classification or grouping of things, are well developed for living things. Many of the groupings of plants and animals take a phylogenetic perspective, namely they make the assumption that there was evolution from a common ancestry. Darwin was one of the first known to have sketched out a 'Tree of life' to illustrate this common ancestry of many life forms. 2 We should, as an informatics community, better define the components of what makes up our discipline, as this would help us define and explain what we do. Creating such a taxonomy should not necessarily constrain us. Darwin recognised that some branches of the tree of life might die and fall away:From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera, which now have no living representatives, and which are known to us only in a fossil state.

Does Informatics Enable or Inhibit the Delivery of Patient-centred, Coordinated, and Quality-assured Care: a Delphi Study

“…This definition, created by Van Bemmel and Musen, defines "informatics" as "the science that studies the use and processing of data, informa-tion and knowledge" [6]. In the context of primary care, we have contextualised this definition as "the scientific study of data, information and knowledge, and the way they can be modelled, processed or harnessed to promote health and develop patient-centred primary medical care" [7].…”