Introduction to healthcare informatics: Fundamentals and historical background

Health informatics is new emerging field all over the world, and it provides good quality health services to all the people in the affordable price and also in an accessible manner. There are so many definitions available for health informatics (HI); in simple way, we can say, how the information technology plays a role in the healthcare sector in terms of collection of data, handling data, storage, retrieval, management, etc. Handling data in the healthcare sector can be a very challenging job due to the increasing sophistication and standardization of data in the medical field. Data comes in various forms such as computable electronic data, structured electronically-entered data that cannot be computed by other systems, and unstructured data. HI or medical informatics or clinical informatics manage healthcare data and information through the application of computers and other technologies. It deals with the data that is between the people and health entities, for example, medical informatics data needs to be shared with informaticians to deal with the data in the various aspects like analysis, transfer, knowledge, and innovation based on that data. HI field also interfaces with other fields like computer science specially with artificial intelligence (AI), biomedical engineering, health sciences and public health. This chapter provides the information of data, knowledge, wisdom to handling health data, electronic health record, health information technology key players, importance of data analytics, healthcare standards and ethics to be followed in the health sectors.