Breaking down the 7 types of health informatics

Health IT vs. health informatics

To understand the importance of health informatics, one must have an understanding of health IT -- the subset of IT concerned with the development, use and maintenance of information systems within the healthcare industry.

Information systems, also known as computer systems, are the processes and components that stakeholders utilize to collect, process and move digital information. These systems are typically comprised of software, hardware, data, personnel and other resources that work in conjunction to turn data into usable insights.

IT is concerned with the technical aspects of enterprise computing, while information systems focus on how people utilize IT, computing and data to drive organizational decision-making and knowledge management.

In the context of healthcare information systems, automation and interoperability are key to ensuring that these function to enhance patient care. Health informatics -- sometimes used interchangeably with medical informatics or clinical informatics -- is characterized by using medical and information sciences expertise to inform the use of technology in healthcare settings.

In addition to bolstering the acquisition and management of healthcare data, professionals in this area are often responsible for maintaining and facilitating EHR use and supporting communication between providers.

Demand for health informatics is informed by rising EHR use, emerging technologies like predictive AI models, accelerated telehealth adoption and other use cases.

The passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, which helped incentivize the use of EHRs and other health IT infrastructure while protecting patient data, has encouraged healthcare providers to pursue informatics in an effort to improve outcomes.

Types of health informatics

There are multiple types of health informatics, which typically center on subsets of healthcare data, populations or use cases. Here, seven of the most common, listed in alphabetical order, are detailed in more depth.

1. Biomedical informatics and bioinformatics

Biomedical informatics deals with the use of biological knowledge -- including principles from biochemistry and the natural sciences -- to guide scientific and medical research inquiries. Unlike more traditional health informatics, biomedical informatics often relies on new technologies, such as AI and cloud computing.

Bioinformatics is closely related, wherein stakeholders use computer and information systems to support genetic and genomics research. Collecting DNA and other biological information for use in analytics has the potential to generate significant insights into patterns of disease and human health, which can be utilized to improve care delivery over time.

For example, bioinformatics is already being utilized to drive pharmaceutical innovations in the realm of drug discovery and repurposing.

2. Clinical informatics

Clinical informatics involves using information technology and data to drive clinical research. The resulting insights can then be applied to patient care and education. Further, clinical informatics can be used to better understand the needs of the healthcare workforce, streamline clinical processes and customize clinical information systems.

EHRs play a key role in clinical informatics, as their use across the United States has bolstered health information exchange (HIE) -- the electronic transmission of healthcare data among stakeholders like providers, payers, health information organizations and government agencies -- over time.

HIE is designed to promote secure, appropriate retrieval of health information to improve care quality, cost, safety and efficiency. Since EHRs serve as central repositories for patient data across the care continuum, they are invaluable for many types of health informatics applications.

To improve EHR usability, or how well clinicians feel they can effectively use their EHR system to perform necessary tasks, some experts are advocating for the implementation of EHR informatics to help new clinicians understand the context of how EHR data is being used to inform quality measurements, population health efforts or revenue cycle management.

By including EHR informatics in regular EHR training programs, stakeholders indicate that issues like clinician burnout could be lessened while enhancing informatics efforts within a health system.

3. Nursing informatics

The American Nurses Association (ANA) defines nursing informatics as "the integration of nursing science, computer science and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice. This data approach to patient care enhances the clinical experience for health care providers and patients."

Nursing informatics takes advantage of the wealth of expertise that nurses use to provide high-quality patient care. As key touchpoints for patients navigating their care journeys, nurses have critical insights into when and how healthcare data is necessary to improve clinical care.

Nurse informaticists use those insights to close gaps between the clinical and technological aspects used to advance patient privacy and safety.

The ANA indicates that nursing informatics brings significant value to healthcare organizations by optimizing EHRs for improved care, enhancing patient safety, streamlining workflows, supporting virtual care, guiding quality improvement and informing decision-making.

Recently, health systems deploying nursing informatics have seen success with virtual nursing programs and using EHR cobots to tackle nurse burnout.

Research suggests that as health informatics continues to grow as a field, nursing informatics is likely to become increasingly important for informing nurse education and improving clinical decision support.

4. Pharmacy informatics

Pharmacy informatics combines pharmacy and information science to guide medication prescribing, dispensing and safety.

"A critical aspect of pharmacy informatics is the use of technology to improve medication safety," per the National Pharmacy Technician Association (NPTA). "This includes barcode scanning technology and automated dispensing systems, which can help to reduce the risk of medication errors by ensuring that the proper medication is given to the right patient at the right time. These systems can also help improve the efficiency of the medication dispensing process, which can help reduce waiting times for patients and improve overall satisfaction."

Pharmacy informatics further plays a key role in telepharmacy by allowing pharmacists to assist with medication management remotely. This type of informatics is also useful for population health, as pharmacy informatics can yield insights into which treatment options may benefit high-risk patient populations.

5. Population health informatics

Population health informatics can help apply health informatics principles to particular groups, which can guide personalized health interventions.

"While health informatics is making sense of healthcare data in a myriad of use cases, population health informatics is often used for risk scoring and stratification, predictive models and categorizing a specific patient population. That population is usually based on a specific healthcare issue, and it is often associated with factors such as geographic area, age and more," according to Creighton University.

As such, population health informatics is useful for value-based reimbursement. Since value-based care delivery is assessed in terms of care quality, quality must effectively be measured. Quality measures can be informed by data gathered using population health informatics.

The application of health informatics principles can also be used to address healthcare disparities and persistent challenges like hospital readmissions, alongside initiatives like disease monitoring and surveillance, which is useful for public health.

6. Public health informatics

The Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) conceptualizes public health informatics as the science of using data, information and knowledge to address public health problems. The organization emphasizes that to support health outcomes within communities, public health stakeholders must obtain, exchange and interpret large amounts of disease data.

Analyses of these data sets are one of the first steps of effective public health work. Public health informaticists support these efforts by developing information system infrastructure that enables data collection and translation, allowing researchers and others to make data-driven public and population health improvements.

To date, researchers have begun to explore how informatics-driven public health approaches could be used to mitigate the impact of climate change-related adverse outcomes and improve sickle cell disease surveillance.

7. Translational research informatics

Translational research informatics can be applied alongside other types of health informatics, with a focus on analyzing and using existing biomedical data to guide applications for improved diagnostics, disease staging, prognosis and treatment.

The insights generated throughout this process can inform various preventive, predictive and personalized medicine applications.

Trends and future directions in health informatics

While these are not the only subdomains of health informatics -- literature reviews indicate that the areas of primary care and dentistry informatics, among others, are also being explored -- these seven are currently driving much of the work in the space.

The use of health informatics to enhance practice management is unlikely to slow anytime soon, especially as healthcare organizations grapple with modernizing their information systems and advancing interoperability.

In 2023, a white paper published by Frost & Sullivan and Canon Medical Informatics highlighted that to drive healthcare digital transformation, stakeholders need unified, scalable informatics and imaging strategies across the enterprise.

This is particularly true as healthcare organizations pursue technologies like AI, machine learning, cloud computing and virtual reality. While these tools have significant potential to positively change the industry, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy cautions that their use also presents significant challenges, such as how the tools can be adopted in line with applicable regulations around patient safety and privacy.

To overcome some of these hurdles, organizations like the American Medical Informatics Association are advocating for health informatics-related policy priorities like evidence-based care and decision support, health IT solutions to reduce biases and discrimination, informatics research funding and reducing healthcare worker burden through the use of clinical informatics.

Shania Kennedy has been covering news related to health IT and analytics since 2022.