| Abstract | Medical informatics is both a science, which seeks to understand the information requirements of medical practice, research, and education, and an engineering discipline, which applies new technologies to help manage the explosion of data and new knowledge that confront contemporary physicians. Computerization of the patient record is expected to resolve long-standing problems with the current paper-based system. Medical decision support applications provide patient-specific advice and remind clinicians about problems that might otherwise be overlooked. New methods are required to evaluate the performance of expert systems in the medical domain where a single "gold standard" solution may not exist. Modern technologies can facilitate communication among multiple providers and between clinicians and patients. The need for improvements in user-interface design and for standards for recording and interchanging information pose ongoing challenges for informatics research. |