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Introduction If anatomy is the 'structure of life ', physiology the 'logic of life', and pathology the 'logic of disease', then health informatics is the 'logic of healthcare'. The emergence of health informatics as a new discipline is due in large part to rapid advances in computing and communications technology and to an increasing awareness that the huge knowledge base of medicine is essentially unmanageable by traditional paper-based methods. There is a growing conviction that the process of informed decision making is as important to modern healthcare practice as is the collection of facts on which clinical decisions or research plans are made. Health informatics has to do with the use of technology to understand and promote the effective organization, analysis, management, and use of information in health care. It is the rational study and recording of patients and their data using technology as the tool. It is also the study of how medical knowledge is collected, recorded, and then applied using technology to decide the best possible path based on analysis of available data. It is also the way treatments are defined, recorded, selected and evolved based on previous recorded and analysed data. Health Informatics has grown considerably as a medical discipline in recent years. This has fundamentally changed our ability to describe and manipulate medical knowledge from a highly abstract level, to build up rich communication systems to support the process of healthcare delivery. Health
informatics is as much about computers as cardiology is about stethoscopes.
Rather than drugs, X-ray machines or surgical instruments, the
tools of informatics are more likely to be clinical guidelines,
formal medical languages, information systems, or communication
systems, like the Internet. These tools, however, are only a
means to an end, which is the delivery of the best possible healthcare.
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