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Clinical Informatics Overview
What is Clinical Informatics?
Clinical Informatics is a multi-disciplinary field that brings together computer science, cognitive science, and biomedical sciences to understand and solve information problems in healthcare. It is the study of how health data is collected, stored and communicated; how that data is processed into health information suitable for clinical decision making; and how information technology can be applied to support those processes.
Why Clinical Informatics?
Health care and biomedicine have both benefited and suffered from information overload. Information processing is central to clinical work. Clinicians gather general knowledge about the world and collect specific information about their patients. They then apply the general knowledge to the specific patient in order to make clinical decisions. Finally, they implement these decisions. Better information, therefore, will lead to better care. In general, clinical informatics is concerned with helping clinicians of all types leverage information to improve care.
Instructional Programs
The Masters of Science (MS) degree focuses on the study of how health and biomedical data are collected, stored and communicated and how the data are processed into health information suitable for research and applied to administrative and clinical decision making. The curriculum stresses interdisciplinary teams to address complex informatics problems. Assignments are, whenever possible, based on real-world problems. Students have been able to find solutions to real problems and apply them to real health care environments. The Doctor of Philosophy PhD) program is research-oriented. PhD (graduates go on to faculty positions at academic institutions or to lead interdisciplinary research teams in industries and healthcare institutions.
Students come from a wide variety of backgrounds with a variety of skills. Each student, along with a faculty admissions committee, determines the student’s curriculum from a matrix of courses. Scientists and practitioners across UTHSC-Houston, the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and beyond provide a real world laboratory for honing reasoning, knowledge and research skills. The program has received strong support from UT-Houston and other TMC institutions.
Research Areas
Research in clinical informatics usually involves information processing methods and applications. The following are fundamentals and applications currently being explored by faculty and students at The School of Health Information Sciences:
Cognitive Science: understanding how people perceive, process, and generate information
- Artificial intelligence
- Human-centered computing: designing technology to meet the user’s needs
- Medical error: improving patient safety by designing better applications, processes, and systems
Knowledge Representation: how to represent concepts to allow automated inference
- Ontology design, standards and vocabularies
- Decision analysis: theory and practice of decision-making
- Decision support and clinical practice guidelines: helping clinicians make better decisions
- Information retrieval: retrieval of information from large text databases such as MEDLINE
- Informatics for bio-security and disaster relief
Policy: the effect of information technology on the health care system
Telemedicine: delivering health care at a distance using technology
Data Mining: knowledge discovery in large data sets
Primary Clinical Informatics Faculty
For BioSketch, please click on the faculty name.