Publication Alert! IALH Research Fellows Elizabeth Borycki, Andre Kushniruk and Helen Monkman have written a new research article entitled Toward an Integrative and Holistic Approach to the Discipline of Health Informatics. The article was published in Multidisciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity in Health.

Summary:

Health care is being transformed by the increased use of information technology at all healthcare system levels. It has included advances in supporting decision-making and processing information related to health for professionals, patients, and society in general. In parallel, these educational advances in health informatics have led to new conceptualizations of what health informatics entails as a field and what it encompasses in terms of content. Along these lines, the authors describe an integrative and holistic approach to defining, conceptualizing, and operationalizing health informatics as a discipline that draws from many sub-fields yet forms a coherent body of discipline-specific knowledge. The chapter describes our nearly 40 years of experience with education and practice in health informatics at one of the world’s well-established health information science schools at the University of Victoria in Canada. Although health informatics integrates a wide range of knowledge and methods from many sub-disciplines, the chapter argues for a coherent framework helpful in understanding health informatics advances and guiding education in the area. Challenges and future opportunities for health informatics as an academic discipline or field are also discussed.

To read the full article, see https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-96814-4_26