Health and Biomedical Informatics: Opportunities and Challenges for a Twenty-First Century Profession and its Education

The benefits of health information technology (HIT) for improving health, health care, public health, and biomedical research are well-known. Several recent systematic reviews have documented the evidence in favor of information technology (IT) interventions, clinical decision support, and telemedicine. This paper's objectives are to characterize the health and biomedical informatics workforce, its professionalization, and its education through a literature review and analysis of the literature. Although the value of HIT is increasingly well-documented, there are still barriers to its widespread adoption around the world. One of those barriers is a well-defined and competent workforce for developing, evaluating, and implementing systems. There are plenty of opportunities in health and biomedical informatics, yet there also is still much that we do not know about this workforce and its education. Continued efforts must be made to characterize and understand the optimal organization and education of this workforce.