Education of medical informatics in Bosnia and Herzegowina

Abstract

Time of information in which the authors live resulted in the increase of the amount of the information exponential growth of the new kind of knowledge, flourishing of the familiar ones and the appearance of the new sciences. Medical (health) informatics occupies the central place in all the segments of modern medicine in the past 30 years—in practical work, education and scientific research. In all that, computers have taken over the most important role and are used intensively for the development of the health information systems. Following activities develop within the area of health informatics: health-documentation, health-statistics, health-informatics and big-medical, scientific and professional information. The pioneer in the development of the health statistics and informatics in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) was Dr Evgenije Sherstnew, who was the Chief of Health Statistics in the Ministry of Health of BiH from 1946–1952. and who founded and led, from 1952 to the end of his life, the Department of Medical Documentation and Health Statistics of the Central Health Institute of BiH, the core around which a group of experts for the development of this field have gathered. In the eighties computers were intensively used as a tool for the processing medical data and with them the development of health information systems at the level of the outpatient-clinics, hospitals, clinical centers, as well as the integral information system of health, health insurance and the social security system of BiH began. Finally, Society for Medical Informatics of BiH, which as a professional association gathers experts in the area of health informatics, actively propagates this profession in the Republic, was founded. With reform of the lectures and curriculum at the medical faculty in Sarajevo, the course in ‘Medical Informatics’ has been in 1992. into the second semester, since it was assumed that an early insight into the principles of information along with studies of so called basic pre-clinic sciences, especially basics of information, would make things easier for the students the more informative education is in the course of their medical studies. The medical faculty in Sarajevo also established and accepted a course of health informatics and economics of post-graduate studies in 1979, of which the main objective is education of experts for work informatics jobs in health care system and services, especially for needs of the future information systems in BiH.