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Progress and Barriers

William Hersh, MD

JAMA. 2004;292:2273-2274.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In the 3 decades since the term "medical informatics" was first used, individuals working at the intersection of information technology (IT) and medicine have developed and evaluated computer applications aiming to improve health and health care.¹ The road to successful use of IT in medicine has not been easy, with examples of failures in both computer systems and networks.^2-3 However, a variety of applications from the field of medical informatics have matured in recent years.⁴

Fueled by several factors including increased emphasis on ensuring patient safety and preventing medical error, as well as development of new biotechnologies such as gene microarrays, the need for informatics applications in health care has become apparent to the larger community. Recent actions such as the organization of the National Health Information Infrastructure⁵ and the National Institutes of Health Roadmap⁶ represent milestones that solidify the importance of IT in patient care and . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland.

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