Seite - ix - in Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics - Knowledge Base for Practitioners

3. Definitions of Health Informatics There is still no single universally agreed definition of health informatics, but we now seem to have a converging set of ideas. Although the principal professional societies still use the older and narrower term “medical informatics” in their organizational names (e.g. EFMI, IMIA and the American Medical Informatics Association, AMIA), they each pro- mote more inclusive wording in their official publications. Early definitions of medical informatics were: • “the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including the information science and the technology to support these tasks” [9] • “the scientific discipline concerned with the systematic processing of data, in- formation and knowledge in medicine and health care” [10] Whereas IMIA prefers the phrase “biomedical and health informatics” (BMHI) [11], AMIA favours the term “biomedical informatics” (BMI), which it defines [12] as: • “the interdisciplinary field that studies and pursues the effective uses of bio- medical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solv- ing and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health”. In this definition, BMI is the “scientific core” that is applied in the domains of bio- informatics and imaging informatics, health informatics (comprising clinical and public health informatics) and translational informatics. It has been argued that the more holis- tic term “biopsychosocial” would be a better adjective than “biomedical” [13], but in its World Health Organization definition the global term “health” subsumes all aspects of physical, mental and social well-being [14]. Therefore, we use the term “health infor- matics” as a simple and inclusive descriptor to cover both BMHI and BMI. We find the AMIA definition particularly helpful in its articulation of the three “foundational domains” of health informatics: health science, information science, and social science and their various overlaps (see Figure 1, from [15]). We have used this model to structure the content of this textbook around the major subject areas. 4. Meaning and Importance of Interdisciplinarity in Health Informatics Whatever label we choose to adopt for our field, it is unquestionably “interdisciplinary” as noted in the AMIA definition. Reflecting the three foundational domains, it is always the case that health informatics needs both healthcare and information science knowledge and skills. Increasingly often, the importance of the social sciences is also recognized. Interdisciplinary is defined as “contributing to or benefiting from two or more disciplines” [16] and is helpfully distinguished from “multidisciplinary” and “transdisciplinary” in the following summary [17]: • Multidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries. Interdisciplinarity analyzes, synthesizes and harmo- nizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole. Trans- disciplinarity integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and transcends their traditional boundaries. ix