Biomedical and Health Informatics Education - the IMIA Years

Abstract

Objective: This paper presents the development of medical informatics education during the years from the establishment of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) until today.

Method: A search in the literature was performed using search engines and appropriate keywords as well as a manual selection of papers. The search covered English language papers and was limited to search on papers title and abstract only.

Results: The aggregated papers were analyzed on the basis of the subject area, origin, time span, and curriculum development, and conclusions were drawn.

Conclusions: From the results, it is evident that IMIA has played a major role in comparing and integrating the Biomedical and Health Informatics educational efforts across the different levels of education and the regional distribution of educators and institutions. A large selection of references is presented facilitating future work on the field of education in biomedical and health informatics.

Keywords: Education; biomedical informatics; health informatics; medical informatics; nursing informatics.

Fig. 1

The search process of papers related to Biomedical Informatics Education

Fig. 2

Number of published papers per decade (n=177)

Fig. 3

Number of published papers per origin (n=174, some authors had multiple origins and the corresponding papers were removed)

Fig. 4

Number of published papers per origin and decade

Fig. 5

Number of papers per generic Medical Informatics search term

Fig. 6

Number of papers per educational Medical Informatics search term

Fig. 7

Number of papers per curriculum