What is biomedical informatics?

Abstract

Biomedical informatics lacks a clear and theoretically grounded definition. Many proposed definitions focus on data, information, and knowledge, but do not provide an adequate definition of these terms. Leveraging insights from the philosophy of information, we define informatics as the science of information, where information is data plus meaning. Biomedical informatics is the science of information as applied to or studied in the context of biomedicine. Defining the object of study of informatics as data plus meaning clearly distinguishes the field from related fields, such as computer science, statistics and biomedicine, which have different objects of study. The emphasis on data plus meaning also suggests that biomedical informatics problems tend to be difficult when they deal with concepts that are hard to capture using formal, computational definitions. In other words, problems where meaning must be considered are more difficult than problems where manipulating data without regard for meaning is sufficient. Furthermore, the definition implies that informatics research, teaching, and service should focus on biomedical information as data plus meaning rather than only computer applications in biomedicine.

A New Socio-technical Model for Studying Health Information Technology in Complex Adaptive Healthcare Systems

“…This dimension includes everything on the data-informationknowledge continuum that is stored in the system (i.e., structured and unstructured textual or numeric data and images that are either captured directly from imaging devices or scanned from paper-based sources) [35]. Clinical content elements can be used to configure certain software requirements.…”

Uso de las tecnologías de información y comunicación para el cuidado del binômio materno-fetal: revisión de tema

“…Esta definición es lo suficientemente amplia como para incluir la mayoría de las actividades que se consideran actualmente para entrar en el ámbito de la informática biomédica 7 . Es decir, utilizar datos, información y conocimiento generados en el sector salud y las áreas biomédicas para la solución de problemas y toma de decisiones.…”

Personalized Biomedical Data Integration

“…In addition to computationally heavy informatics solutions, human-developed information research is also a crucial component in overall information delivery (Bernstam, Smith et al 2010). These efforts include domain ontology creation (Yu 2006) and mapping for multiple standards in the same domain, e.g., unified medical language system (UMLS) (Bodenreider 2004) for SNOMED and ICD.…”