Mayo Clinic Medical Informatics ProjectsThe field of medical informatics involves applying informatics techniques to the entire spectrum of medical care, improving clinical practice, enhancing knowledge management, and enabling clinical and translational research. Leveraging the theory and practice of information and knowledge integration, management, and use, medical informatics is an integral component in all aspects of health care delivery, biomedicine and public health, conducted through multidisciplinary research, development and application.
The section of Medical Informatics is part of the Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics in the Department of Health Sciences Research at Mayo Clinic. It explores the adoption, development and application of theory, methods and tools originating from computer science, information science, cognitive science, social science, and engineering in health care and biomedical sciences. The group works to support and eventually optimize the following processes:
Coding, storage, retrieval, transmission and delivery of data for health care delivery and biomedical research
Decision-making for therapeutic and preventive interventions and for health services organizations, both at the patient and population levels
Data mining and knowledge discovery ranging from microlevel health sciences research, such as biochemistry and molecular biology studies, to macrolevel research, such as population-based investigations
The Mayo Clinic section of Medical Informatics focuses primarily on transforming health care through innovative informatics and analytics. It is recognized as one of the best of its kind in the nation and contributes prominently to national and international biomedical informatics and standards communities.
The section of Medical Informatics supports the following services:
Clinical data normalization
Natural language processing
Information retrieval
Clinical terminology
Formal ontology development and deployment
These services are enriched by a broad program of basic informatics research and embedded informatics cores in partnership with clinical and basic biology researchers.