The rise of health informatics

Perhaps the greatest change in medical thinking over the last two centuries has been the ascendancy of the scientific method. Modern medicine has moved away from seeing disease in isolation, to understanding that illness occurs at a complex system level. Infection is not simply the result of the invasion of a pathogenic organism, but the complex interaction of an individual's immune system, nutritional status, environmental and genetic endowments. By seeing things at a system level, we come ever closer to understanding what it really means to be diseased, and how that state, however defined, can be reversed.

Integrated Electronic Medical Systems are now available that allow medical staff to check any aspect of a patient's status quickly, easily and from a desktop computer anytime and from anywhere in the world. By integrating lab results, radiology and other imaging results, physicians can provide much more integrated and responsive care to their patients. By providing this kind of integrated and seamless care, a completely new dimension is being provided to patient care.

We now need to make the same conceptual leap and begin to see the great systems of knowledge that enmesh the delivery of healthcare. These systems produce our knowledge, tools, languages and methods. Thus, a new treatment is never created and tested in intellectual isolation. It gains significance as part of a greater system of knowledge, since it occurs in the context of previous treatments and insights, as well as the context of a society's resources and needs.

Further, the work does not finish when we scientifically prove a treatment works. We must try to communicate this new knowledge, and help others to understand, apply, and adapt it.

These then, are the challenges for medicine.

• Can we put together rational structures for the way clinical evidence is pooled, communicated, and applied to routine care?
• Can we develop organisational processes and structures that minimise the resources we use, and maximise the benefits delivered? and finally,
• What tools and methods are needed to be developed to help achieve these aims in a manner that is practicable, testable, and in keeping with the fundamental goal of healthcare - the relief from disease?

The role of medical informatics is to help develop a rational basis to answer these questions, as well as to help create the tools to achieve these goals.

Our Goal

• To increase awareness, design and promote educational programs on the role of Information Technology in the Health Care Industry.
• To train our students to leverage this knowledge in improving hardware and software solutions for improving medical practices, better patient care and delivery of healthcare.

The growing role of health informatics in the way healthcare will be delivered and the growing requirement of international agencies , Consulting agencies , Corporates and Corporate Hospitals to have members trained in Health Informatics has motivated the Amity Institute of Health & Allied Sciences to offer these new innovative programme's.