Public health informatics (PHI) denotes the logical application of computer science, information, as well as technology to the practice of public health, learning, and research (O'Carroll, 2013). PHI is an interdisciplinary vocation that uses engineering, mathematics, information science, as well as related social sciences to significant public health processes and problems.
The field of informatics has been applied and is significant in the components of public health involving public health surveillance, nursing, environmental health, emergency response, and administration. Public health informatics has provided methods or techniques for attaining goals of public health in a better, faster, and at lower costs through levering computer science, technology, or information science (O'Carroll, 2013).
Public health informatics is helpful in the description and study of complex systems, for instance, workflow of public health nursing or disease transmission models. Moreover, PHI is important in the identification or recognition of opportunities to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of public health frameworks via creative data collection or application of information. Besides, public health informatics is crucial in the maintenance and implementation of systems and processes to attain such improvements.
The scope and application of public health informatics in broader than that of medical informatics, medical informatics narrows into the recording and modeling real-world events and concepts into computable data applied to develop actionable information. This is done depending on the expertise within medicine, information technology, information science, as well as the scholarly examination of issues, which affect the productive application of information frameworks by clinical personnel (Health informatics video, 2014). On the contrary, public health informatics is broad to encompass innovations and value addition on interventions through offering the ability for timely detection of threats in health and their communication (O'Carroll, 2013). Public health informatics serves the larger public health community than medical informatics by creation of enterprise standards, architecture, interoperability, and systems.
References
Health Informatics: Course Video Introduction. Videos: Latest Videos on Health Informatics: Course Video Introduction. | Times of India [Video file]. (3/4/2014). Retrieved from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Health-Informatics:-Course-Video-Introduction.-/videos/
O'Carroll, P. W. (2013). Public health informatics and information systems. New York: Springer.
