Health informatics: A Uk and Canadian perspective on current and future challenges

Health Informatics (HI) is an evolving field drawing in synergies from interdisciplinary domains. At the beginning, this field primarily addressed the issues relating to the application of Information Technology (IT) in healthcare delivery. Instead, HI has expanded and matured into a complete science. HI is now spread across the various facets of health science, computer science, health management, e-Health, IT, communication technologies and so forth. Many government healthcare departments across the world have accepted the importance of these facets and embarked on different strategies and plans for delivering a better healthcare delivery for the twenty first century. As a part of this initiative, developed and developing countries fast-tracked the establishment of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) since experts envisaged that this would be the core of all informatics exchange in health domain. This paper would limit itself to address the issues related to the UK and Canadian health domain. Further it provides an understanding on the current strategies being adopted in UK and Canada. Finally the discussion identifies the challenges and suggestions on the aspects that are to be considered for a successful HI program.