Health informatics and its contribution to health sectors

Abstract

In most developed countries, healthcare sectors take more than 10% of the GDP, and it is one of the most significant and most rapidly growing sectors globally. With such growth of the healthcare department, data management becomes challenging; a robust platform helps to address these challenges. Health Informatics (HI) is an upcoming development, an interdisciplinary field in healthcare sectors; it combines the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the healthcare software, which helps boost the overall operational efficiency of the healthcare departments. These AI algorithms integrated into IoT devices help acquire, store, retrieve, and use health and medical-related data. Patient data are enormous in healthcare sectors, and it is required for various purposes by hospital administrators, insurance agents, doctors, nurses, and other health departments. Accessing and managing these datasets often becomes challenging; HI is one of those innovations that has helped address these challenges to a large extent. The chapter discusses informatics, related definitions, HI, and its relation with other disciplines. The chapter also provides an educational overview of the evolution of HI, different HI technologies, benefits and challenges of HI to its various stakeholders. It ends with some thoughts on HI's future growth.