New Challenges for Health Informatics

Abstract:

In March 2001, the International Medical Informatics Association organized a workshop entitled “Challenges in Medical Informatics” in Madrid, Spain. It invited twenty members of the medical* informatics community to discuss current issues relating to the academic standing of the field. The broad objectives of the workshop were (a) to review the relevance of medical informatics as an academic discipline in today’s setting and (b) to examine its impact by the new world economy. One of the issues discussed was to find an appropriate response to the growing emergence of bioinformatics in the age of genomic discovery and molecular medicine. With the exciting discoveries in molecular medicine coming hot on the heels of the first draft of the mapping of the human genome and the availability of high-throughput measurement of gene expressions using microarray techniques, bioinformatics has, in recent years, gained prominence in life sciences research and development. As the next phase of research will see the applications of genomic and proteomic data in the clinical management and treatment of patients, it is inevitable that bioinformatics and health informatics will converge, presenting an exciting new challenge for our field. The terms “biomedical informatics” and “clinical bioinformatics” have been used to describe this convergence.

Another exciting challenge for health informatics comes from the spectre of global bioterrorism. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA and the spate of anthrax outbreaks there and elsewhere, there has been an urgent need to review current methods of disease surveillance. Current research in “preventive bioterrorism” focuses on the use of prodromal (warning) symptoms to predict serious infectious disease outbreaks. The health informatics challenge, in this case, is to develop a wide area network of health information systems to achieve real-time reporting of prodromal symptoms from sentinel stations and to deploy datamining and decision analytical techniques for the outbreak predictions.

The third challenge to be covered in this presentation relates to the deployment of networked virtual reality for remote tele-rehabilitation of patients with cognitive and physical impairments. While the benefits of deploying telemedicinal principles for remote medical rehabilitation of patients are clear, the costs and use of virtual reality pose a real challenge. Some solutions are proposed in this paper.

 

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