JAMIA: What makes an informaticist?

Medical informatics is more than health IT. The growth of educational informatics programs and omnipresence of health IT tools have led to a misunderstanding of who informaticists are and what they do, according to a perspective published online Oct. 11 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Health IT support staff, health information managers and clinicians tinkering with computers are not necessarily medical informaticists, wrote Charles P. Friedman, PhD, director of the health informatics program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and former chief scientific officer of the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT. “Tinkerers are wonderful and the world needs them. They have terrific ideas, but typically, because tinkerers lack formal training in the basic information sciences, what they develop is not scalable or usable by anyone other than the developer herself.”

Friedman provided a three-part definition of what makes an informaticist: cross-training in the fields of information science and health, drive to help others achieve benefits from health IT and engagement with a specific process for implementing and evaluating information systems.

Informaticists require training in both an information science, such as cognitive, computer or organizational, and health, whether clinical, public or biological. Informatics occurs when the two separate realms interact, according to Friedman. While informaticists may know less about each separate realm than their full-time practitioners, there is value in their abilities to communicate with members of and draw cognitive connections between the two realms.

Informaticists also are those driven by the belief that “persons supported by IT will be better than the same persons performing the same task unassisted,” Friedman wrote. Informaticists help by doing research to determine whether IT assistance is helping and how it can be improved.

Lastly, informaticists are involved at every step in a process to create and evaluate information systems and resources from model formulation to system development to deployment to study of effects. They apply their dual knowledge of information science and application domain each step of the way.

“These chaotic times should mobilize the community that has considered informatics as its professional home for several decades to offer a compelling affirmative statement of what the field of informatics actually is,” Friedman wrote. “The signal originating from this effort may be lost amidst the rapidly rising level of noise in the environment, but there remains a solemn obligation to try.”