Health informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, medicine and health care. It deals with the resources, devices and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems.

Subdomains of (bio)medical or health informatics include: clinical informatics, nursing informatics, imaging informatics, consumer health informatics, public health informatics, dental informatics, clinical research informatics, and bioinformatics, and pharmacy informatics.

Aspects of the field

1) architectures for electronic medical records and other health information systems used for billing, scheduling or research

2) decision support systems in healthcare

3) messaging standards for the exchange of information between health care information systems (e.g., through the use of the HL7 data exchange standard) - these specifically define the means to exchange data, not the content

4) controlled medical vocabularies such as the Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT), Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) or OpenGALEN Common Reference Model - used to allow a standard, accurate exchange of data content between systems and providers

5) use of hand-held or portable devices to assist providers with data entry/retrieval or medical decision-making.

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