Charting a path for our members

Health informatics is becoming more important to the delivery of health and health care and more diverse in the kinds of settings and expertise that health informatics professionals will need to be successful. Precision medicine initiatives will need to leverage translational informatics and data sciences to connect genomic and data insights with actionable clinical information. Consumer-focused health devices and electronic health records raise issues of interoperability, usability, and workflow integration that are essential to applied informatics professionals. In the health policy realm, changing models of reimbursement not only will require population health and data sciences expertise, but also will require knowing the right questions to ask and how to integrate the answers into health care. It is the informatics professionals, represented by AMIA’s 5,300-plus members, who possess the leadership and expertise to contribute across these domains and to make a real difference in how information is collected, analyzed, and used to improve the health of our society. But other organizations are seeing the importance of health informatics and the potential for financial and marketing opportunities. Programs are springing up that profess to teach health informatics, but are using faculty who lack informatics training and are teaching to a curriculum that does not include core informatics concepts. Associations are offering …