 Health Informatics is the use of information tools and techniques, not only computers, to support clinical care, health services administration, health research, and education. For clinical care, Health Informatics tools and techniques are used to capture and record information, so you can have a patient record. For clinical care, Health Informatics tools are used to provide prompts to clinicians so that they don't give drugs that may be harmful when they're used together. Health Informatics techniques can also be used to support clinical care by providing prompts to clinicians based on keywords in the record, reminding them what conditions are more or less common in the community. The techniques and tools are also used to support communication between clinicians electronically. So clinical care help through health services administration, once you have an electronic information and electronic form, you can easily aggregate it. When you can aggregate and capture information by groups of patients, you can use it to develop predictive modeling or data mining techniques, which can learn the characteristics of people who are most likely to have one or another health condition. You can also use these tools and techniques to help you learn which patients are most likely to benefit from a particular intervention and which ones are most likely to be harmed. So in terms of health services administration, if you consider the Thalidomod Tragedy, if over the years people have been capturing information about health care activities and linking them to the results, people would have known much earlier that Thalidomod was harmful. And in more recent history, the whole question of Easter's in replacement for post-menopausal women, is where it took many years to learn that Easter's in replacement posed risks to people. In terms of health services administration, in a world where people are constrained of resources, almost everyone would agree that you certainly should stop doing things that you know are harmful and probably not do things that are only mischievous waste of money. For clinical care health services administration, research essentially capture information about patients or characteristics and learn what they're likely to have, what's likely to work with for them. That's good. And for education, clinicians were in a world today where patients have access to all of the world's libraries including medical libraries. So you can get just-in-time information about a particular patient and their problems. You can get just-in-time information about drugs. And you can get just-in-time information that will help explain particular constellations of signs and symptoms. So health informatics is used to support clinical care health services administration, research, and patient and provider education.