What Is Medical Informatics - Some Formal Definitions of the Field

Medical Informatics has been emerging as a discipline in its own right over the past quarter century. During that evolution, there have been a number of notable attempts along the way to define the field in scientific and formal yet succinct terms, and in many cases each has built on its predecessors. Following are some of the more often-cited of those definitions.

Allan H. Levy, 1977 - identified the scope of medical informatics as "...dealing with the problems associated with information, its acquisition, analysis, and dissemination in health care delivery processes." (1)

Morris F. Collen, 1977 - "Medical informatics is the application of computer technology to all fields of medicine - medical care, medical teaching, and medical research." (2)

Jan van Bemmel, 1984 - "Medical informatics comprises the theoretical and practical aspects of information processing and communication, based on knowledge and experience derived from processes in medical and health care." (3)

Jack D. Myers, 1986 - "...a developing body of knowledge and set of techniques concerning the organization and management of information in support of medical research, education, and patient care." (4)

Donald A.B. Lindberg, 1987 - "Medical informatics attempts to provide the theoretical and scientific basis for the application of computer and automated information systems to biomedicine and health affairs . . . medical informatics studies biomedical information, data, and knowledge - their storage, retrieval, and optimal use for problem-solving and decision-making. (5)

M.S. Blois and Edward H. Shortliffe, 1990 - "Medical informatics is the rapidly developing scientific field that deals with the storage, retrieval, and optimal use of biomedical information, data, and knowledge for problem solving and decision making." (6)

British Medical Informatics Society - "...the understanding, skills, and tools that enable the sharing and use of information to deliver healthcare and promote health" and "...the name of an academic discipline developed and pursued over the past decades by a world-wide scientific community engaged in advancing and teaching knowledge about the application of information and technologies to healthcare - the place where health, information and computer sciences, psychology, epidemiology, and engineering intersect. (7)

AMIA Education Committee - "The discipline that studies and applies information management and science in the context of biomedicine and health."


(1) Levy, A.H. "Is informatics a basic medical science?" Proceedings of MEDINFO, 1977, p. 979.

(2) Preliminary announcement for the Third World Conference on Medical Informatics, MEDINFO 80, 1977.

(3) Van Bemmel, J.H. "The structure of medical informatics" Medical Informatics, 9(1984), p. 175.

(4) Myers, J.D. "Medical education in the information age." Proceedings of the Symposium on Medical Informatics, 1986, p. 3.

(5) Lindberg, D.A.B. NLM Long Range Plan. Report of the Board of Regents, 1987, p. 31.

(6) Blois, M.S., and E.H. Shortliffe. "The computer meets medicine: Emergence of a discipline" in Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care, 1990, p. 20.

(7) Web site of the British Medical Informatics Society http://www.bmis.org