Dr. Joseph Kim in his website on non-clinical medical jobs raised the question recently: “How do you define “medical informatics”? How about “health informatics”? Clinical informatics? Biomedical informatics? Public health informatics? The list just goes on…”
MINDWEST Strategies offered thoughts because our firm’s position is that effective internal and external communications, as well as intelligent management of any complex enterprise, now hinges vitally on informatics. MINDWEST founder John S. Hale commented:
I have used “informatics” for decades and believe it is a powerful and useful term. Coined in Europe where it is more widely used — in the U.S. almost nobody uses the term except in healthcare and some academic settings. It has been a touchstone for my consulting practice at MINDWEST Strategies, where I have given informatics a working definition: “the ‘nervous system’ of computers, communications and management practices powering successful ventures in the Knowledge Economy …” It transcends the strictly machine-oriented understanding of cybernetics — as pioneered in Kobayashi’s 1985 visionary discussion of “computers and communications” — to include the seamless enmeshment of machine intelligence with human intelligence and social systems for the purpose of sentient decision making and coherent action. Informatics instantiates what Tielhard de Chardin envisioned more grandly as the noosphere that is taking observable shape today. In practical terms, smart “informatics” help to synchronize complex systems of the sort Margaret Wheatley discusses in “Leadership and the New Science.” Maybe the usage in healthcare has struck a chord because allopathic medicine has an intuitive appreciation for the interleaving of systems essential to healthy function. The idea, however, is just as relevant to any enterprise trying to be cost-effective across boundaries. In another formulation, MINDWEST Strategies talks about Corporate IQ ™. This is akin to the marketing slogan from SUN Microsystems some years ago: “The network IS the computer.” Informatics enable the technology, people and social rules that ARE the “organism.”
Not for everyone. But for those seeking a fulcrum for real communications and management influence … something to consider. We should not overlook one of the profound pioneers of this kind of thinking: Douglas Englebart (inventor of the computer “mouse,” the concept of hypertext and so much that we take for granted today) whose CODIAK concept regarding “concurrent development, integration and application of knowledge” is the genius behind today’s most competitive, high-performing enterprises.
