Health informatics and evidence-based medicine - more than a marriage of convenience?

The importance of informatics in healthcare is more than just a consequence of rapid information technology (IT) developments over the last couple of decades. Informatics-related activities are located at the very heart of healthcare and involve biomedical sciences, computer sciences and healthcare policy and management. Evidence based medicine (EBM) may be defined as the explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The key principles of EBM - from finding, appraising and using research-based knowledge, to establishing systems for managing medical knowledge and promoting and facilitating evidence-based decisionmaking - have parallel informatics functions. Benson has described these as knowledge browsing, messaging and counting. Health informatics can be described as the very engine room driving EBM. As a consequence of this health informatics is embroiled in an intense social and medical dialogue about the very basis of scientific method, theory and practice of medicine.

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