Health informatics refers to the connection between technology and human beings and its output in the form of specific values. It is a concept that is based on three topics: information science, computer science, and health care. In other words, it can be described as digitally keeping, processing, and extracting information from human health records.
Every improvement in "technology", which is at the center of health informatics, positively affects this concept and brings it closer to making health a concept independent of the hospital. Because with technology, the collection of people's health parameters can be minimized from large devices, and the reporting of data can be done remotely in seconds. On the other hand, with the change and development observed here, data processing techniques are changing, and the need for experts can be minimized, especially with the use of artificial intelligence.
Major events that have paralyzed global health, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, have led to a common awareness that human health should be monitored from home, that contact between the doctor and the patient should be carried to the home, and that there is a consensus on the importance of technology (Kadakia, et al., 2020).
Miniaturization of the devices, making them suitable for home use, leads us to the concept of continuous monitoring. Continuous monitoring is dependent on wearable technologies, but it enables long-term monitoring of human health and parameters such as blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen saturation in daily life.
It provokes a change in the norms of human health, which have been monitored under specific conditions in the laboratory for decades and, presumably, the boundaries have been drawn accordingly.
Heath Informatics from the past to today:
REFERENCES:
Buntin, M. B., Jain, S. H., & Blumenthal, D. (2010). Health information technology: laying the infrastructure for national health reform. Health affairs, 29(6), 1214-1219.
Brody, D. S. (1980). The patient's role in clinical decision-making. Annals of internal medicine, 93(5), 718-722.
Greenes, R. A., Barnett, G. O., Klein, S. W., Robbins, A., & Prior, R. E. (1970). Recording, retrieval and review of medical data by physician-computer interaction. New England Journal of Medicine, 282(6), 307-315.
Kaelber, D. C., & Bates, D. W. (2007). Health information exchange and patient safety. Journal of biomedical informatics, 40(6), S40-S45.
Kadakia, K., Patel, B., & Shah, A. (2020). Advancing digital health: FDA innovation during COVID-19. Npj Digital Medicine, 3(1), 1-3.
Thompson, W. R. (2022). Worldwide survey of fitness trends for 2022. ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal, 26(1), 11-20.
Lewis, D., Chang, B. L., & Friedman, C. P. (2005). Consumer health informatics. In Consumer health informatics (pp. 1-7). Springer, New York, NY.