INTRODUCTION

Medical Informatics has been defined as the study of how medical knowledge is created, shaped, shared and applied.  (Enrico Coiera 1997).  It is a discipline that has become more and more important as the body of knowledge available to health care professionals has grown as our knowledge of the practice of medicine becomes more sophisticated it has become clear that the process of making diagnoses and medical decisions is both complex and idiosyncratic.  Thus the science of how decisions in health care are made was born.  Evidence based medicine represents a scientific response to the oft cited criticism of the great variability evident in clinical practice.  Getting access to and using knowledge appropriately are skills which are far more important today than heretofore.  Thus the use of electronic databases and virtual sources of information has become all the more important.

The health informatics courses provided by this domain are based upon the assumptions inherent in the Coiera definition of medical informatics, thus there are portions of our courses that describe how knowledge is created and shaped as well as exploring how information is shared and applied.  For each of the courses described on this web site there will be clear aims and objectives.  If you examine the objectives for your course you will have a clear idea about what you will be expected to know or do by the end of the course.  

• Disclaimer
• Privacy
• Copyright
• Accessibility