Monday, January 18, 2010

Medical, Biomedical. and Health Informatics Programs in the United States


Let me refer you to a nice resource on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science website. The Informatics Degree Programs Summary is a resource that outlines various academic informatics programs offered in the United States. So, whether you're thinking about a master's program or even a PhD program, you should study this list.

The list is broken down into several different areas of informatics, but I'll highlight these 5 areas:
  1. Medical informatics
  2. Biomedical informatics (or bioinformatics)
  3. Health informatics
  4. Nursing informatics
  5. Pharmacy informatics
The site also lists dental informatics and others like chemoinformatics. Do we really need so many different types of health-related informatics programs? Is it really critical for us to differentiate between medical vs. biomedical informatics? Is it better for a nurse to get a degree in nursing informatics vs. health informatics? Is it getting too confusing to have all these different informatics programs?

1 comment:

  1. I would be reluctant to ascribe much differentiation to programs that choose to call themselves medical, health, biomedical, etc. informatics. I would argue that their orientations are relatively similar and they teach many of the same things. The more important principle is "informatics," which exemplifies the focus of using information to improve health, healthcare, biomedical research, etc..

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