Biomedical Informatics

Division of Biomedical Informatics

Biomedical informatics is a broad interdisciplinary field that draws upon computer science, computer engineering, information science, and cognitive psychology. For the past several decades, biomedical informatics has played a central role in modern healthcare through the widespread use of clinical information systems, such as electronic health records, radiology information systems, clinical registries, patient portals, and clinical decision support. With the advent of high throughput technologies for genomics and translational sciences, biomedical informatics is critical to the curation, integration, visualization and mining of large data sets to support the discovery of complex relationships between biomarkers and disease outcomes. With the entire enterprise of healthcare now reliant on information technologies, faculty in the Division of Biomedical Informatics are focused both on advancing the knowledge needed to effectively use such technologies to improve clinical outcomes and on developing novel informatics methods for emerging ‘big data’ challenges in comparative effectiveness research and personalized medicine.