Category talk:Health Sciences Workgroup

There needs to be an article on medical informatics or healthcare informatics. There is such an article on Wikipedia, but it strikes me more as a collection of links than an article with any real sense of unity. Of course, there is some question as to the nature of the discipline itself. For many, it is simply all aspects of the use of computers in medicine, and I suppose that is a reasonable definition, but it is hardly very enlightening. My experience has been that there are common themes (distributed computing, databases, security and privacy, metadata, ontologies, interfaces at higher levels of abstraction, decision support, etc.) and the field certainly has a very different "flavor" from enterprise applications in other fields. Still, I find it very difficult to identify what might be called the essence of the field, and that makes it difficult to write a main article that is not essentially a grab bag, along the lines of the Wikipedia article. I'm open to suggestions here. Greg Woodhouse 16:19, 29 March 2007 (CDT)