Health Informatics: The Cutting Edge

Adopting digital health records and sharing the data they contain is a critical step forward. However, since successful management of chronic disease must involve patients, using informatics tools and systems to engage them is now a major area of focus for academic and industry research and development. Much of our focus so far has been on the care of patients one at a time. Another major area of research and development involves the aggregation of data from large groups of patients to understand population (or public) health issues such as the factors external to traditional medicine that cause disease and that impact on our ability to treat it. Finally, digital health data is increasingly being used for research on methods to deploy predictive analytics to improve the diagnosis and treatment of disease as well as to run hospitals and health systems more cost effectively.