Origins of Medical Informatics

Medical informatics is a new knowledge domain of computer and information science, engineering and technology in all fields of health and medicine, including research, education and practice. Medical informatics has evolved over the past 30 years as medicine learned to exploit the extraordinary capabilities of the electronic digital computer to better meet its complex information needs. The first articles on this subject appeared in the 1950s, the number of publications rapidly increased in the 1960s and medical informatics was identified as a new specialty in the 1970s.