Systems Engineering and Health Informatics

Healthcare organizations are struggling to provide safe and high quality care while reducing costs. Abundant data on various aspects of the care delivery process (both clinical and non-clinical) are collected and stored in large databases in different parts of the organization. Informatics, as an area of study with roots in computer science and information science, has grown and evolved to enable collection, storage, retrieval, and analysis of data, and reporting of useful information. Health informatics (HI) ranges from bioinformatics to public health informatics depending on the level of focus and applications. At the same time, systems engineering (SE), as an interdisciplinary field of engineering, has grown to encompass the design, analysis, and management of complex health systems to improve their quality and performance. HI and SE are complementary in their approach to identification of problems, methodology, and solution procedure for improvement. This combination brings forth implications for industry and education to address pressing issues of today’s health care delivery.