Globalizing Healthcare

20

© 2002

Schattauer GmbH

The Micro-Macro Spectrum of Medical

Informatics Challenges:

From Molecular Medicine to Transforming Health

Care in a Globalizing Society

C. A. Kulikowski

Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Jersey

Summary

Background: Medical informatics has always encompassed a very broad spectrum of techniques for clinical

and biomedical research, education and practice.

There has been a concomitant variety of depth of

specialization, ranging from the routine application

of information processing methods to cutting-edge

research on fundamental problems of computer-based

systems and their relations to cognition and perception

in biomedicine.

Objectives: Challenges for the field can be placed in

perspective by considering the scale of each – from

the highly detailed scientific problems in bioinformatics and emerging molecular medicine to the broad

and complex social problems of introducing medical

informatics into web-related global settings.

Methods: The scale of an informatics problem is

not only determined by the inherent physical space in

which it exists, but also by the conceptual complexity

that it involves, reinforcing the need to investigate

the semantic web within which medical informatics is

defined.

Results and Conclusion: Bioinformatics, biomedical

imaging and language understanding provide examples that anchor research and practice in biomedical

informatics at the detailed, scientific end of the

spectrum. Traditional concerns of medical informatics

in the clinical arena make up the broad mid-range of

the spectrum, while novel social interaction models of

competition and cooperation will be needed to understand the implications of distributed health information technology for individual and societal change in

an increasingly interconnected world.

Keywords

Medical informatics, bioinformatics, biomedical

imaging, languages, ontologies

Methods Inf Med 2002; 41: 20–4

Methods...