Medical Informatics

Program Description:

Medical Informatics first emerged as a new field to apply computer technology to medicine. It then developed further to extend its applications to other fields like decision science, information science, management science, cognitive science, and organizational and social sciences. 

The first organization for informatics was developed by a German scientist Gustav Wagner in 1949. For the first time, during the 1960s, the term Medical Informatics (Informatique Medicale) was coined by French scientists. This was the time when specialized university departments and training programs for Medical Informatics were developed in some of the European countries such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. Later, during the 1970s, Medical Informatics units and departments were also developed in Poland and the US. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) was founded in 1980 to provide support for this emerging discipline. The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) is an independent organization established under Swiss Law in 1989 in order to play a major global role in the application of Information Technology in the fields of healthcare and medical practice and research. Since 2001, young Iranian scholars have been sent abroad, mainly Canada, Sweden, The Netherlands, and Australia, to officially learn this new discipline of science. In 2003, in America, the famous report of the Institute of Medicine “Crossing the quality chasm” further highlighted the importance of this discipline by introducing the application of Health Information Technology as a way to alleviate the growing problems in the quality of current medical practice.

Definition:

The field of Medical Informatics is an interdisciplinary area of science dealing with the design, development, adoption and application of information and communication technology innovations in healthcare practice, health care management, and planning. It also deals with the organization of healthcare information, clinical decision-making, medical knowledge management and discovery, and evaluation of the impact of information technology on medical research, education, and patient care.

Objectives:

With a growing need and new demands for the application of Medical Informatics knowledge on the one hand, and the return of first graduates from Canada and Europe, on the other, Medical Informatics was established as a PhD course by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education of the I.R. Iran in 2009. The main objectives were to meet the growing needs of the health care system and to disseminate and internalize the discipline’s knowledge through training and educating specialized taskforce. The mission is to build a bridge between relevant disciplines of science, such as Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, and Organizational Science on the one hand, and Medical Science on the other, in order to benefit from the advantages of the interdisciplinary cooperation.