Medical Informatics Research Guide

"The ethical obligations of the health information management (HIM) professional include the safeguarding of privacy and security of health information; disclosure of health information; development, use, and maintenance of health information systems and health information; and ensuring the accessibility and integrity of health information." From the American Health Information Management Association.

"The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) is a cooperative partnership between the public and private sectors. The Panel was formed for the purpose of harmonizing and integrating standards that will meet clinical and business needs for sharing information among organizations and systems."

Resources about health information privacy from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.

"Health information technology (health IT) involves the exchange of health information in an electronic environment. Widespread use of health IT within the health care industry will improve the quality of health care, prevent medical errors, reduce health care costs, increase administrative efficiencies, decrease paperwork, and expand access to affordable health care." From the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office for Civil Rights.

"NLM is the central coordinating body for clinical terminology standards within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NLM works closely with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to ensure NLM efforts are aligned with the goal of the President and HHS Secretary for the nationwide implementation of an interoperable health information technology infrastructure to improve the quality and efficiency of health care."

"Health information technology (health IT) makes it possible for health care providers to better manage patient care through secure use and sharing of health information. Health IT includes the use of electronic health records (EHRs) instead of paper medical records to maintain people's health information."

"The United States Health Information Knowledgebase (USHIK) is an on-line, publicly accessible registry and repository of healthcare-related metadata, specifications, and standards. USHIK is funded and directed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) with management support and engagement from numerous public and private partners."

"The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) is the premier association of health information management (HIM) professionals worldwide. Serving 52 affiliated component state associations and more than 103,000 health information professionals, it is recognized as the leading source of "HIM knowledge," a respected authority for rigorous professional education and training."

"AMIA is a community committed to the vision of a world where informatics transforms people’s care. Over the last 35 years, the use of informatics has grown exponentially to improve health and to make better healthcare decisions. Today, informatics is the key to accelerating the current goals of healthcare reform."

"ANIA Mission: To advance nursing informatics through education, research, and practice in all roles and settings."

"The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) was established in 1978 as part of an effort to achieve recognition for the medical transcription profession. In the beginning, the association focused on educating medical professionals about what medical transcriptionists do and how their work affects the quality of health care. When the U.S. Department of Labor granted medical transcriptionists their own job classification in 1999, it was an important milestone to getting the work recognized as much more than clerical. In 2012, AHDI adopted a new title—healthcare documentation specialists—to reflect the broad and extensive responsibilities and services they provide in the creation of accurate and comprehensive patient care records."

"HIMSS is a global, cause-based, not-for-profit organization focused on better health through information technology (IT). HIMSS leads efforts to optimize health engagements and care outcomes using information technology."

"Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services."

"Cancer registrars are data information specialists that capture a complete history, diagnosis, treatment, and health status for every cancer patient in the U.S. The data provides essential information to researchers, healthcare providers, and public health officials to better monitor and advance cancer treatments, conduct research, and improve cancer prevention and screening programs."

The Public Health Data Standards Consortium (The Consortium) is a non-profit membership based organization of federal, state and local health agencies; professional associations; academia; public and private sector organizations; international members; and individuals."

"CiteSeer^x is an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science."

"Presented by the Library of Congress, Congress.gov is the official website for U.S. federal legislative information."

"GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) provides free online access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government."

"ARRS GoldMiner® helps users find images and articles from peer-reviewed biomedical journals. Although intended primarily for health professionals and students, it is available to all users without charge."

Image search from Google - either text-based or reverse image.

A news aggregator

"Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results."

Reverse image search - upload an image or provide a URL to an image's online location.

"USA.gov is an interagency product administered by USAGov (formerly the Federal Citizen Information Center), a division of the U.S. General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Service. Our mission is to create and organize timely, needed government information and services and make them accessible anytime, anywhere, via your channel of choice."

"Wolfram|Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods."
Want to have fun? Look what the response is to the question "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"