Updated Informatics.Health

William Hersh, MD, Professor and Chair, OHSU
Blog: Informatics Professor
Twitter: @williamhersh

For many years, I have had a portion of my Web site billhersh.info devoted to an introductory overview of the informatics field entitled, What is Biomedical & Health Informatics? I originally created this site to provide an answer to that question I was asked from time to time. I still maintain and keep it up to date both to still provide an overview of the field as well as demonstrate the technology we use in our virtual courses.

Last year I had an upgrade of sorts, snagging the new domain name, Informatics.Health. With the 2020 updating of my larger course that is offered in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 10×10 (“ten by ten”) program, I have now updated the content of the What Is site.

The main part of the site is the nine lecture segments on the following topics:

  • What is Biomedical and Health Informatics? (1) (24:32)
  • What is Biomedical and Health Informatics? (2) (18:49)
  • A Short History of Biomedical and Health Informatics (22:30)
  • Resources for Field: Organizations, Information, Education (25:29)
  • Examples of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) (24:56)
  • Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (1) (14:15)
  • Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (2) (22:07)
  • Information Retrieval (Search) (23:18)
  • Information Retrieval Content (29:09)

One change this year is that the materials are only in HTML 5, dropping the use of Adobe Flash, which is being phased out at the end of this year. (The tool used to create the lectures is Articulate Studio 360.) The lectures can be viewed on just about any Web platform, and work fine on my iPhone and iPad.

The site also contains links to books, articles, organizations, and educational Web sites.

The materials on the site are freely available and have been used by many educators and others. An article from the American Medical Association (AMA) described their use by medical educators during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article post first appeared on The Informatics Professor. Dr. Hersh is a frequent contributing expert to HealthIT Answers.