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BIOMEDICAL
HEALTH INFORMATICS
The field that oversees, integrates, and evaluates data and technologies is called biomedical and health informatics. It focuses on putting to work data and information for the benefit of human health and the understanding and treatment of disease.
The last decade has seen substantial adoption of electronic health records by healthcare delivery systems. This has led to use of data to improve healthcare delivery and facilitate biomedical research. There has also been an explosion of data from other sources, from the genome and other biologic sources to individuals tracking health through web applications, mobile devices, and wearables. On top of all this, advances in machine learning and related areas are leading to new insights from data and starting to impact individual health and healthcare.
There are about three dozen academic programs devoted to informatics around the U.S., mostly in academic health science centers. One of the most prominent in the country is right here in the Silicon Forest at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). Situated in the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) in the School of Medicine.
William Hersh, MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University. He can be reached by EMAIL and also He also maintains a WEBSITE, BLOG, and an OVERVIEW SITE about the informatics field.
The Intersection of Health & Computing
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