Public Health Informatics

This chapter situates public health informatics (PHI) within an informatics perspective and the two broad trends relevant to its understanding; the first concerns medical and health informatics, which focuses on the application of information and communications technologies for the better understanding of the human body. This includes clinical, nursing, radiology, drug-related informatics, among others. This domain has been driven largely by clinicians, and informed by the disciplines of medicine, informatics, and cognitive and behavioural psychology. This field of study and practice has largely been focused on in North America and Europe, while low and middle-income countries (LMICs) have broadly been excluded. The second trend is of PHI systems, which have focused on the population, and practised the collection and use of aggregate statistics. This focus has largely been promoted by statisticians and demographers, and practised primarily in LMICs. These two trends have remained isolated from each other, yet evolved simultaneously.