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Health Informatics Essay

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Introduction
Health informatics is the bridging of computer science, information and the health care field. This interdisciplinary field can be applied to a range of medical fields such as nursing, biomedicine, medicine and subspecialties such as immunology (immunoinformatics). Informatics not only has roles to play in day-to-day areas of immunology such as data storage/retrieval, decision support, standards and electronic health care records but also in research and education such as data mining and simulation systems (Coiera, 2002). Informatics and more specifically, health informatics first started being used in in the late 1950s with the rise of computers (Ho, 2010). Technologies such as computers allowed practitioners and researches …show more content…

Decision support systems are ideally interactive systems that allow the decision making physician to come to the conclusion based on a host of information pulled from data bases, personal knowledge, predesigned modals etc. Decision support systems have many benefits such as; patient-time efficiency, speed up process of decision making, promotes learning and training, reveals new approaches in thought process, generates new evidence in support of a decision and encourages exploration and discovery of the decision maker (Bosworth, York, Kotansky, & Berman, 2011). Although these systems require end user expertise, correct inputs and appropriate modals, they also require vast and exstenive information. Immunoinformatics are used to compile vast amounts of data for the immunology field (De Groot A. , Immunomics: discovering new targets for vaccines and therapeutics , 2006). This data includes genetic mapping, protein structures, cytometry data and many other data pools needed by immunologists to make correct decisions. Immunoinformatics face to challenge of compiling this enormous amounts of data in an organised and correct way. This data needs to be mapped into correct diagnostic modals for the physician to use in their decision support system (Barh, Misra, & Kumar, 2010). This data leads to new ways of hypothesis testing for immune responses

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