Subjects and Research Trends in Medical Informatics

Medical informatics (MI), or more generally Biomedical and Health Informatics, has been most variously and often inconsistently defined.1According to onedefinition, it is “concerned with the optimal use of information, often aided by the use of technology, to improve individual health, health care, public health, and biomedical research.”2According to another it is “a discipline, concernedwith the systematic organization, representation, and analysis of data, information, and knowledge in biomedicine and health care.”3 Recommendations for MI education, which were revised by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), can also be a clue for defining the field of MI.4 On the other hand, MI is frequently referred to by other names, with different yet closely related meanings. “Biomedical and Health Informatics,” “Biomedical Informatics,” Healthcare Informatics,” and “Clinical Informatics” are someof them.5 As the name MI is more frequently used in journal classifications (such as Institute for Scientific Information [ISI] and Science-Metrix), terminologies (PubMed), or in the names of non-governmental organizations (such as IMIA and American