About
"To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America's medical records are computerized....It just won't save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs--it will save lives."
- President Barack Obama (January 24, 2009)
"Modern biomedical scientists use computers and robots to separate molecules in solution, read genetic information, reveal the three-dimensional shapes of natural molecules like proteins, and take pictures of the brain in action. All of these techniques generate large amounts of data, and biology is changing fast into a science of information management. There is no way to manage these data by hand. What researchers need are computer programs and other tools to evaluate, combine, and visualize these data."
- National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research Roadmap
ABOUT OUR PROGRAM
The OHSU biomedical informatics program is one of the largest of its kind in the world. In its decade and a half of existence, we have awarded 281 degrees to 272 individuals. We are recognized around the world for the quality and innovation of our program and the capabilities of our graduates. The recent awarding of $5.8 million of funding for health IT workforce by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) development validates our approach.
About our Department
The Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) is housed in the Biomedical Information Communication Center (BICC) on the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Marquam Hill campus. The Department Chair is William Hersh, MD and the Vice Chairs are Cynthia Morris, PhD; Joan Ash, PhD, and Shannon McWeeney, PhD .
DMICE consists of more than 50 faculty members, including those with primary academic appointments in the department, those from other OHSU departments with joint appointments and affiliate faculty with expertise who work for Oregon healthcare institutions, companies, and other organizations outside the university.
The department also has more than 60 on-campus and several hundred online graduate students, including fellows and those pursuing certificates, master’s degrees and doctoral degrees in biomedical informatics, clinical informatics, and health information management. The biomedical informatics graduate program has been operational since 1992 and has awarded over 262 degrees and certificates.
WHAT IS BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS?
Biomedical informatics (also known as medical informatics) is a multidisciplinary field concerned with the acquisition, storage and use of information in health and biomedicine. This may include research, education and health information management.
These are exciting times for the field of biomedical informatics. On the clinical informatics side, the federal government and others are making unprecedented investments in the electronic health record and other information technology (IT) to improve health, healthcare, public health, and biomedical research. There is growing recognition that health IT can not only improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare and public health delivery, but also that it can empower patients and consumers. On the bioinformatics and computational biology side, advances in genomics and proteomics as well as new emphasis on translational research promise to revolutionize our approaches to health and disease. The world of biomedical research has fundamentally changed, with experiments now generating massive amounts of data and researchers being required to interact with databases and other information resources to guide their work. Biomedical informatics is playing a key role in clinical and research areas, and there is great need for both informatics researchers to conceptualize and develop the new applications as well as informatics practitioners to implement them.
