You might be stumped when deciding which career path to take, should I follow Health Informatics or Bioinformatics? Or you might be confused by the differences between these two similarly named fields. In this blog post, I am going to break down the similarities and differences between these fields so you can make a decision as to which career path is right for you.
What is Health Informatics?
This field can be described as the use of health and clinical data to drive and support patient health outcomes. There are several case studies that fall under the realm of Health Informatics, for instance, transferring patient data securely within the hospital to various Electronic Health Records. Another example is analyzing patient data from patients who are readmitted back into the hospital and designing a clinical dashboard to track this. Health Informatics can be described as the merging of skills from Information Technology and Healthcare. Health Informatics has subspecialties such as Nursing Informatics and Public Health Informatics.
What is Bioinformatics?
Bioinformatics can be described as the use of biological data to model and solve problems in fields such as genomics, proteomics and pharmacology. The field of bioinformatics is responsible for the fast development of mRNA vaccines and the work involved with processing large amounts of data from biological experiments. Another example of the work done in this field is the human genome project, the mapping of all the genes that make up human DNA.
In this chart below I have outlined some of the key differences between these fields:
| Factors | Bioinformatics | Health Informatics |
|---|---|---|
| General required skills | Biostatistics, Epidemiology, R, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB, Computational biology | SQL, R, Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, HL7 Standards, Biostatistics |
| Potential entry-level roles | Research Assistant, Junior Bioinformatics Specialist, Computational Biologist | System Analyst, Clinical Decision Support Analyst, Methodologist, Epidemiologist, Clinical Informatics Analyst, Health Data Analyst |
| Places of work | Academic research labs, Government organizations, Medical laboratories | Hospitals, EHR/EMR Vendors (e.g. Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH) Government organizations, Healthcare startups |
| Professional certifications & organizations | Bioinformatics.ca | Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CPHIMS) |
| Job Resources | http://www.bioinformatics.org/jobs/ | https://www.himss.org/ |
All in all, there can be interchangeable terms when it comes to describing fields such as Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, my advice would be to look for a job that interests you and base your studies on the skills needed to be considered for that particular job. Have additional questions about which career path is right for you? Leave a comment down below 😀
2 Comments
zareen · June 13, 2023 at 9:14 am
Does bachelors in life sciences along with course in R and Python langauage is sufficient for taking a masters course in Bioinformatics. what are the chances of qualifying the admissions program?
healthanalyticinsights · June 13, 2023 at 7:44 pm
Hello Zareen, it depends on the admission requirements of the course at the school you are applying to, usually they have a page listing the admission requirements which could include a grade average and/or undergraduate degree requirements that you would need to obtain before applying.