Health informatics is a spectrum of multidisciplinary fields that includes study of the design, development and application of computational innovations to improve health care. The disciplines involved combines medicine fields with computing fields, in particular computer engineering, software engineering, information engineering, bioinformatics, bio-inspired computing, theoretical computer science, information systems, data science, information technology, autonomic computing and behavior informatics. In academic institutions, medical informatics research focus on applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare and designing medical devices based on embedded systems. In some countries term informatics is also used in the context of applying library science to data management in hospitals. Clinical Research Informatics (CRI) is a sub-field of health informatics that tries to improve the efficiency of clinical research by using informatics methods. Some of the problems tackled by CRI are: Creation of data warehouses of health care data that can be used for research, support of data collection in clinical trials by the use of electronic data capture systems, streamlining ethical approvals and renewals (in US the responsible entity is the local institutional review board), maintenance of repositories of past clinical trial data (de-identified). CRI is a fairly new branch of informatics and has met growing pains as any up and coming field does. Some issue CRI faces is the ability for the statisticians and the computer system architects to work with the clinical research staff in designing a system and lack of funding to support the development of a new system. Researchers and the informatics team have a difficult time coordinating plans and ideas in order to design a system that is easy to use for the research team yet fits in the system requirements of the computer team. The lack of funding can be a hindrance to the development of the CRI. Many organizations who are performing research are struggling to get financial support to conduct the research, much less invest that money in an informatics system that will not provide them any more income or improve the outcome of the research. Ability to integrate data from multiple clinical trials is an important part of clinical research informatics. Initiatives, such as phenx and patient-reported outcomes measurement information system triggered a general effort to improve secondary use of data collected in past human clinical trials. Telehealth is the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long-distance patient and clinician contact, care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, monitoring and remote admissions. Telemedicine is sometimes used as a synonym, or is used in a more limited sense to describe remote clinical services, such as diagnosis and monitoring. Remote monitoring, also known as self-monitoring or testing, enables medical professionals to monitor a patient remotely using various technological devices. This method is primarily used for managing chronic diseases or specific conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes mellitus, or asthma.

Thanks&Regards
Max Wilson
Journal Coordinator
Journal of Dentistry and craniofacial research