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AMIA Mission and History

Improve health through informatics education, science and practice

Mission

AMIA aims to lead the way in transforming health care through trusted science, education, and the practice of informatics. AMIA connects a broad community of professionals and students interested in informatics. AMIA is the bridge for knowledge and collaboration across a continuum, from basic and applied research to the consumer and public health arenas.

Domains

AMIA actively supports five domains:

Translational Bioinformatics is the development of storage, analytic, and interpretive methods to optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data, and genomic data, into proactive, predictive, preventive, and participatory health. Translational bioinformatics includes research on the development of novel techniques for the integration of biological and clinical data and the evolution of clinical informatics methodology to encompass biological observations. The end product of translational bioinformatics is newly found knowledge from these integrative efforts that can be disseminated to a variety of stakeholders, including biomedical scientists, clinicians, and patients.

Clinical Research Informatics involves the use of informatics in the discovery and management of new knowledge relating to health and disease. It includes management of information related to clinical trials and also involves informatics related to secondary research use of clinical data. Clinical research informatics and translational bioinformatics are the primary domains related to informatics activities to support translational research.

Clinical Informatics is the application of informatics and information technology to deliver healthcare services. It is also referred to as applied clinical informatics and operational informatics.

Consumer Health Informatics is the field devoted to informatics from multiple consumer or patient views. These include patient-focused informatics, health literacy and consumer education. The focus is on information structures and processes that empower consumers to manage their own health--for example health information literacy, consumer-friendly language, personal health records, and Internet-based strategies and resources. The shift in this view of informatics analyzes consumers' needs for information; studies and implements methods for making information accessible to consumers; and models and integrates consumers' preferences into health information systems. Consumer informatics stands at the crossroads of other disciplines, such as nursing informatics, public health, health promotion, health education, library science, and communication science.

Public Health Informatics is the application of informatics in areas of public health, including surveillance, prevention, preparedness, and health promotion. Public health informatics and the related population informatics, work on information and technology issues from the perspective of groups of individuals. Public health is extremely broad and can even touch on the environment, work and living places and more. Generally, AMIA focuses on those aspects of public health that enable the development and use of interoperable information systems for public health functions such as biosurveillance, outbreak management, electronic laboratory reporting and prevention.

AMIA's program and services are centered around core purposes to:

  • advance the science of informatics
  • promote the education of informatics
  • assure that health information technology is used most effectively to promote health and health care
  • advance the profession of informatics
  • provide services for our members such as networking and opportunities for professional development.

AMIA History

AMIA (the American Medical Informatics Association) is a professional scientific association that was formed by the merger of three organizations in 1988: the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI); the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI); and the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC).

For more than 35 years, members of AMIA and its honorific college, ACMI, have sponsored meetings, education, policy, and research programs. AMIA continues to gain influence as the authoritative voice in the growing field of informatics through the individual and collective efforts of its members, who continue to drive thought leadership, and research and practice in their respective disciplines.