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Even though medical informatics is most often viewed from the perspective of its host disciplines in clinical and biologic medicine, it has an identity and agenda of its own. This paper is an attempt to promote discussion about the long-term role and agenda for medical informatics as a discipline into the next decade. The discussion has two main lines of argument, one about the "engineering" goals of informatics and the [...]

Informatics and information technology hold the promise of a consumer-centered health enterprise--one that provides quality care at a cost society is willing to pay; one where need-based, adaptive, competency-based learning results in cost-effectiveness of health education; one where team-based health and learning on demand, coupled with monitoring of process outcomes and network access to expertise, guarantee quality. The barriers to this promise are the professional guilds, the cross-subsidies that support [...]

Medical informatics is defined largely by its host disciplines in clinical and biological medicine, and to project the agenda for informatics into the next decade, the health community must envision the broad context of biomedical research. This paper is a sketch of this vision, taking into account pressures from changes in the U.S. health care system, the need for more objective information on which to base health care decisions, and [...]

Since the 1970s, it has been clear that the health community needs to develop a health care system that matches a person's needs with the expertise and technology to address those needs. The logical solution is a multi-tiered system. In such a system, physicians would provide second- and third-tier services and other health professionals would provide first- and second-tier services. Medical informatics should take on the challenge of supporting the [...]

The 1998 Scientific Symposium of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) was devoted to developing visions for the future of health care and biomedicine and a strategic agenda for health and biomedical informatics in support of those visions. This symposium focus was prompted by the many major changes currently underway in health care delivery, education, and research, as well as in our health and biomedical enterprises, and by the [...]

: To develop a generic methodology for the online assessment of medical education materials available on the World Wide Web and to implement it for pilot subject areas.

The authors consider the problem of identifying new, unexpected, and interesting patterns in hospital infection control and public health surveillance data and present a new data analysis process and system based on association rules to address this problem.

To allow exchange of clinical practice guidelines among institutions and computer-based applications.