Overview

For more information on careers in this field, click on the appropriate profession(s) in the Career Explorer section of this site.

Health or Medical informatics is a discipline that includes all aspects of the information science of health care, from fundamental research to clinical applications. Medical informatics encompasses all means of understanding and promoting the effective organization, analysis, management and use of information in health care. Although the medical informatics field shares the general scope of these interests with some other health care specialties and disciplines, medical informatics has developed its own areas of emphasis and approaches that have set it apart. 

People who work in medical informatics are highly educated in both information science and health care.  They understand how to acquire, store, retrieve and use a wide range of information about health and medicine. They understand the "ins and outs" of computerized and non-computerized information systems and also are familiar with clinical guidelines, workflows and medical terminology.  This is a growing field, but at present the primary areas of specialization include:

• clinical informatics
• clinical research informatics (incl. data mining; knowledge representation and discovery; natural language processing)
• consumer health informatics
• dental informatics
• mental health informatics
• nursing informatics
• pharmacy informatics
• primary care informatics
• public health/population informatics
• telemedicine and mobile computing informatics
• translational bioinformatics
• veterinary informatics

Informaticians work in various occupational settings, including hospitals, health systems, clinics, ambulatory and extended-care facilities, academic institutions, government agencies, non-profit organizations, vendor and consulting firms, and private practice.

Informatician salary and compensation vary widely according to specialty, level of education, geographic location and experience.  However, a starting salary of $40,000 to $50,000 is common. Typical work hours are 40 hours/week but may vary, depending on roles and responsibilities.

For more information on this field and a searchable list of academic programs in Medical Informatics, contact the Communications Manager of the American Medical Informatics Association. The National Library of Medicine also sponsors training opportunities in informatics.

You can download, save and print a PDF of this overview:

Informatics PDF 16 Dec 2008 [pdf, 233 KB]

NOTE:

The above overview has been reviewed and approved by the American Medical Informatics Association.