The Micro-Macro Spectrum of Medical Informatics Challenges: From Molecular Medicine to Transforming Health Care in a Globalizing Society

Abstract

Summary Background: Medical informatics has always encompassed a very broad spectrum of techniques for clinical and biomedical research, education and practice. There has been a concomitant variety of depth of specialization, ranging from the routine application of information processing methods to cutting-edge research on fundamental problems of computer-based systems and their relations to cognition and perception in biomedicine. Objectives: Challenges for the field can be placed in perspective by considering the scale of each – from the highly detailed scientific problems in bioinformatics and emerging molecular medicine to the broad and complex social problems of introducing medical informatics into web-related global settings. Methods: The scale of an informatics problem is not only determined by the inherent physical space in which it exists, but also by the conceptual complexity that it involves, reinforcing the need to investigate the semantic web within which medical informatics is defined. Results and Conclusion: Bioinformatics, biomedical imaging and language understanding provide examples that anchor research and practice in biomedical informatics at the detailed, scientific end of the spectrum. Traditional concerns of medical informatics in the clinical arena make up the broad mid-range of the spectrum, while novel social interaction models of competition and cooperation will be needed to understand the implications of distributed health information technology for individual and societal change in an increasingly interconnected world.

Overview of the Health Informatics Research Field: A Bibliometric Approach

“…In addition, from Figure 4, it is possible to detect some clusters of publications. The group of publications connected by yellow links (top-left corner), whose co-citations began in 2004, seem much influenced by articles by Haux and Knaup [22] and Kulikowski [33] (see black highlighted oval). The Haux and Knaup article provided recommendations on health informatics education; whereas, Kulikowski has described some challenges of health informatics, at both micro and macro levels and from multiple perspectives.…”

Healthcare Information Management Systems

“…For this goal, gene and structure data will have to be correlated with clinical data, that is, with phenotypes and with functions, which will result in another massive increase of complexity [95][96][97][98][99][100]. The Human Genome Project has massively influenced our understanding of the molecular cause of diseases, and it will create new diagnostic and therapeutic methods.…”

Public Health Implications of Bioinformatics

“…The latter will imply a new agenda in health research and novel directions and applications in education and care [11,12]. Interactions with BI, bioengineering, cognitive science, epidemiology and biostatistics will be important interdisciplinary collaboration challenges that might be explored [13,14,15,16].…”