What is health informatics?

Biomedical Informatics at a Glance

The University of Chicago Graham School Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics (MScBMI) is on the leading edge of this interdisciplinary field that is critical to healthcare transformation. Our faculty and graduates work in the spectrum of fields represented below.

With clinical informatics systems already in place across the globe, and as new discoveries in personalized medicine, mobile health, and telemedicine revolutionize patient care, the field of healthcare has become an epicenter of innovation and development. The BMI program prepares students to deploy this cutting-edge knowledge as they think critically across a domain whose primary goal is improving human health.

As a student, you will study fundamental aspects of healthcare information, technology and systems, and related research and policy that will prepare you to excel in this field. The subjects of biomedicine range from nanoscale biology all the way up to global health. For each of these specialties, there is a parallel area in informatics. While the MScBMI program is mainly focused on clinical and health informatics, we offer electives and student project opportunities across the full range of biomedical informatics.

Using informatics as one of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal, clinicians, researchers, and IT professionals are working together to streamline and utilize this vast field of research as they face the challenges and further the discoveries that have arrived with the increasing torrents of data being collected. As more and more clinical data becomes organized in electronic health records, biomedical informatics professionals will continue to broaden the scope of the computer science and data analytics tools they use to correlate and make connections between formerly isolated medical conditions and information.

Whether it’s investigating the dynamics of the US healthcare ecosystem, or identifying how genomics technology and data science techniques support personalized medicine, biomedical informatics revolves around developing a deeper understanding of human health. By responding to specific questions that surround illness and wellness, and developing strategies and tools aimed to aid health-care practitioners in their decision-making processes, biomedical informatics professionals are the architects that sort, structure, assemble, and effectively use data to improve human health.

Biomedical informatics is truly a multidisciplinary field. The spectrum of activities includes: defining data, developing systems to collect and organize data, learning how to securely manage and share data, and finally producing analytics and reports that help people use the data that they have collected. Along this whole spectrum, there are unique aspects of biomedical data that students will learn best in a program specific to biomedicine.