Week 1

Informatics. Health care informatics. Information. Information sharing. Healthcare informatics is information sharing. From our first week in class, I have drawn the conclusion that there are two spectrums of healthcare that mesh to cohesively treat a patient. On one end of the spectrum, we DO a lot of things for our patients. We PASS medications, we DO interventions, we PERFORM surgeries etc. This end of the spectrum is completely dependent on what the other end of the spectrum holds and vice-versa. The other end of the spectrum is information based, or informatics. Here, health care professionals gather as much data as possible (which is useless by itself) and converts it into useful outputs aka information. This is where the ends of the spectrum merge. Without being able to DO things, we would have no direction to our information gathering. On the other hand, without information, we would not know what to DO.

Health care is always improving on what they can DO. Brain tumor? We can now DO surgery to remove it. Great! What good is it to be able to do something, but not know when to do it? Just as we are rapidly increasing our doability in healthcare, we have to likewise increase our knowability. Enter informatics. At its simplest form, informatics takes a vast ocean of information, can pool it, and reduce it down into a few very potent drops of information. The faster and more efficiently that this information makes this transformation, the better. That is what this semester of informatics will be about… I think.