What Is Health Informatics? Fields, Methods & Careers

Health informatics is the interdisciplinary field concerned with how data, information, and knowledge are acquired, managed, and used to improve health and the delivery of health care. It sits between clinical practice, information science, and computer science, and it covers everything from the electronic health record a nurse charts in to the data standards that let two hospitals exchange a lab result. This guide explains what health informatics is, how it relates to the neighboring terms biomedical informatics, clinical informatics, and bioinformatics (which are often confused), the main subfields and methods, how people train for the field, who funds the research, and where it connects to research administration.

What Is Health Informatics?

There is no single definition that every organization uses, and the differences are informative. Two professional bodies frame the field in complementary ways:

• The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) defines health informatics as “the acquisition, processing, interpretation, and utilization of healthcare data, which is fundamentally health information.” The emphasis is on the data and information itself and on the professionals who manage it.
• The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) uses the broader umbrella term biomedical informatics, which it describes as the interdisciplinary field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving, and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health. In AMIA’s framing, application areas range from bioinformatics to clinical and public health informatics and span the spectrum from the molecular to the population level.

Put plainly, health informatics is the study and practice of using information, information technology, and data to improve health outcomes and the care that produces them. The core questions are practical ones: how should clinical information be captured so it is accurate and reusable, how should it be represented so different systems can exchange it, how can it support a decision at the bedside, and how can it be analyzed responsibly for quality improvement and research?

Health Informatics vs. Biomedical Informatics vs. Bioinformatics

These terms overlap, and usage differs by country, employer, and academic department. The distinctions below reflect the way AMIA and AHIMA use them; treat them as conventions rather than legal definitions.

Term	Typical scope	Typical data and settings
Health informatics	Using information and technology to improve health care delivery, health information management, and health outcomes	Health records, clinical workflows, administrative and claims data, health information exchange
Biomedical informatics	The broad parent discipline per AMIA: biomedical data, information, and knowledge, from molecules to populations	Genomic, imaging, clinical, and population data, in research and care
Clinical informatics	Applying informatics and information technology to deliver health care services (AMIA also calls this applied or operational informatics)	Decision support, order entry, documentation, system design, implementation, and adoption in hospitals and clinics
Bioinformatics	Computational methods for biological, especially molecular and sequence, data	Genomes, transcriptomes, protein structures, sequence databases

The practical rule of thumb: bioinformatics starts from biological data, such as a sequencing run, and asks what it means biologically. Health informatics starts from health care and health information, such as a patient record or a clinic workflow, and asks how to capture, move, and use it well. Biomedical informatics is the larger umbrella that AMIA uses to hold both, along with clinical, translational, public health, and consumer-facing work. Many people and job postings use “health informatics” and “medical informatics” interchangeably, and some university programs use “health informatics” for what AMIA would file under biomedical or clinical informatics. When you are choosing a degree or reading a funding announcement, read the actual description rather than relying on the label. For the molecular side, see What Is Bioinformatics?.

Scope: What Health Informatics Covers

Across definitions, the field has four recurring concerns:

1. Capturing health data. Designing the forms, devices, and workflows through which clinical, patient-reported, and administrative data are recorded, including the electronic medical record (see electronic medical record).
2. Representing and standardizing it. Controlled vocabularies, coding systems, and messaging standards so that data mean the same thing in different systems. See What Is HL7? and What Is FHIR? for the main exchange standards.
3. Protecting and governing it. Privacy, security, consent, and data stewardship. In the United States this is shaped by HIPAA; see also HIPAA-aware vs. HIPAA-compliant and 42 CFR Part 2 vs. HIPAA for how overlapping rules apply.
4. Using it. Decision support, quality measurement, public health reporting, operations, and research.

Major Subfields

AMIA and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) both organize the field into overlapping subdomains. The NLM’s biomedical informatics training program, for instance, describes trainees focusing on one or more areas including health care and clinical informatics, translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, public health informatics, and consumer health informatics. Briefly:

• Clinical informatics — informatics applied to care delivery: clinical decision support, computerized provider order entry, documentation, and the design, implementation, and adoption of clinical systems.
• Clinical research informatics — the data systems that support clinical studies, such as electronic data capture, registries, and reuse of care data for research. Tools like REDCap are typical examples, and Is REDCap HIPAA compliant? shows how privacy questions arise in practice.
• Public health informatics — surveillance, electronic case reporting, and information systems for population health. See What Is Public Health?, electronic case reporting, and syndromic surveillance reporting for hospitals.
• Translational bioinformatics — AMIA describes this as developing storage, analytic, and interpretive methods to transform growing volumes of biomedical and genomic data into proactive, predictive, preventive, and participatory health. It is where health informatics and bioinformatics meet.
• Consumer health informatics — informatics from the patient or consumer point of view, including patient portals and personal health data.
• Imaging informatics — the storage, retrieval, and analysis of medical images; see What Is Medical Imaging? and What Is Radiology?.
• Nursing informatics and health information management — informatics practice within nursing and within the records, coding, and data-governance professions that AHIMA represents. See What Is Nursing Science?.

Core Methods and Technologies

Health informatics borrows from several disciplines rather than owning a single method. The recurring toolkit includes:

• Data standards and terminologies. HL7 messaging and the FHIR resource model for exchange, plus coding systems for diagnoses, procedures, laboratory tests, and drugs.
• Electronic health record systems. Implementation, configuration, and optimization of enterprise EHRs; a vendor-level view is in Epic vs. Oracle Health (Cerner).
• Clinical decision support. Rules, alerts, order sets, and increasingly model-based tools, evaluated for usefulness as well as accuracy. Alert fatigue and workflow fit are core human-factors problems.
• Data analysis and statistics. Cohort construction from record data, quality-measure calculation, and predictive modeling, drawing on biostatistics, epidemiology, and data science.
• Natural language processing and machine learning. Extracting structure from clinical notes and building prediction models. Applying them responsibly in care raises validation and governance questions; see What Is Artificial Intelligence?.
• Human factors and usability. Evaluating how clinicians and patients actually use systems, since many informatics failures are failures of workflow rather than of software.
• Privacy and security engineering. De-identification, access control, and audit. See de-identified vs. coded vs. anonymized vs. pseudonymized data.

A Brief History

Health informatics grew out of the first uses of computers in medicine and hospital administration in the 1960s, and early work on computer-based medical records, literature retrieval, and clinical decision-making systems followed through the 1970s. The National Library of Medicine, a long-time supporter of the field, built MEDLINE as an online searchable bibliographic service in the early 1970s, and Stanford’s MYCIN project of the same decade became a landmark example of a rule-based clinical expert system. For decades, hospitals and practices adopted record systems unevenly, mostly as local installations.

Two United States developments shaped the modern field. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) created the privacy and security framework within which most health data in the United States is handled. The HITECH Act, enacted in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, then provided Medicare and Medicaid financial incentives to hospitals and eligible professionals for demonstrating “meaningful use” of certified electronic health record technology, which accelerated EHR adoption. The incentive program has since been reshaped; see the Promoting Interoperability Program for hospitals and eCQM reporting for hospitals for the current reporting side.

The profession also formalized. After the American Board of Medical Specialties approved clinical informatics as a medical subspecialty in September 2011, the first board examination was given in October 2013. Notably, the subspecialty is sponsored by the American Board of Preventive Medicine and the American Board of Pathology and is open to diplomates of all ABMS member boards, rather than being limited to physicians from a single parent specialty.

Training Paths and Careers

People enter health informatics from clinical, information-management, and technical backgrounds, and the training landscape reflects that.

• Degrees. Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs exist under several names (health informatics, biomedical informatics, clinical informatics, health information management). In the United States, the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM) accredits master’s programs in health informatics and in health information management; accreditation status is worth checking if a credential matters to your employer.
• Physician subspecialty. Physicians certified by any ABMS member board can pursue board certification in clinical informatics, as described above.
• Professional credentials. AHIMA offers credentials in health information and data analytics, including the Certified Health Data Analyst (CHDA), and also the RHIA and CHIA credentials it references in its health informatics materials.
• Research training. The NLM’s institutional training grants (T15) fund pre-doctoral and postdoctoral training programs that lead to research careers in biomedical informatics.

Typical roles include clinical informatics specialist or analyst, EHR implementation and optimization lead, chief medical or nursing informatics officer, clinical data analyst, interoperability or integration engineer, health information manager, privacy and compliance officer, public health informatician, and academic or industry informatics researcher.

Societies and Journals

The main professional homes include AMIA (biomedical and health informatics broadly), AHIMA (health information management and informatics), and the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), the international federation of national informatics societies. HL7 International maintains the HL7 and FHIR standards discussed above. Widely read journals include the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, the International Journal of Medical Informatics, Applied Clinical Informatics, and JMIR Medical Informatics. Check each journal’s own scope statement before submitting: some favor methods papers, others implementation and evaluation studies.

Funders of Health Informatics Research

Health informatics is funded from several directions, and which one fits depends on whether the work is methods research, training, or implementation.

• The National Library of Medicine (NIH) is the NIH institute most associated with biomedical informatics, funding research and the T15 training programs.
• Other NIH institutes fund informatics as a component of disease- or population-focused work, such as data infrastructure for a research network or a registry.
• Federal health IT agencies, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), focus on health IT policy, adoption, and its effect on care.
• Health systems, foundations, and industry sponsor implementation, evaluation, and product-oriented research.

Funding announcements frequently describe informatics work in their own words, so search by method and problem as well as by the word “informatics.” Program requirements, eligibility, and deadlines change, and should be confirmed in the current announcement.

Health Informatics and Research Administration

Research administrators meet health informatics constantly, even when nobody uses the term. Studies that use patient records need privacy determinations and data use agreements. Multi-site studies need shared data models and secure environments. Funders increasingly expect a data management and sharing plan that addresses standards and repositories. Practical touchpoints include:

• Privacy and data governance. Whether a study uses identifiable, coded, or de-identified data changes the review pathway; see the HIPAA pages linked above and designated record set vs. legal health record.
• Data management. Planning for standards, documentation, storage, and sharing; see the CASRAI research data management hub.
• Clinical research operations. Electronic data capture, source data, and registry design connect informatics to trial operations; see the clinical research hub.
• Budgeting. Data engineering, programming, and secure computing are real costs that should be in the proposal rather than absorbed.

This guide is part of CASRAI’s Branches of Science series.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is health informatics in simple terms?

It is the practice of using health data, information, and technology to improve health and health care. Examples include designing how clinicians document in an EHR, setting the standards that let systems exchange patient data, and analyzing record data to measure quality of care.

Is health informatics the same as biomedical informatics?

Not exactly. AMIA uses biomedical informatics as the broad discipline covering biomedical data, information, and knowledge from molecules to populations. Health informatics is often used for the narrower part focused on health care delivery and health information, though the terms are used interchangeably in many places.

How is health informatics different from bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics centers on computational analysis of biological data such as sequences and structures. Health informatics centers on health care information and its use in care and public health. The two meet in translational bioinformatics, for example when genomic results are returned into a patient record.

Is health informatics the same as health information management?

They overlap but are not identical. Health information management, the profession AHIMA represents, centers on the integrity, governance, coding, and release of health records. AHIMA treats health informatics as an area in which those professionals play a pivotal role. Informatics also includes technical, analytic, and clinical-decision work that goes beyond records management.

Do I need a clinical background to work in health informatics?

No. Many practitioners come from nursing, medicine, or pharmacy, but others come from information management, computer science, statistics, or public health. Clinical informatics board certification, however, is a physician subspecialty.

What do HL7 and FHIR have to do with health informatics?

They are standards for exchanging health data between systems, which is a central informatics problem. See What Is HL7? and What Is FHIR?.

Who funds health informatics research?

Mainly NIH (especially the National Library of Medicine), federal health IT agencies such as ONC and AHRQ, and foundations, health systems, and industry. Confirm current programs in official announcements.