What is the difference between bioinformatics and medical informatics?
Biomedical Informatics is an emerging discipline that has been defined as the study, invention, and implementation of structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and management of medical information. Medical informatics is more concerned with structures and algorithms for the manipulation of medical data, rather than with the data itself. This suggests that one difference between the two fields lies with their approaches to the data; there are bioinformaticists interested in the theory behind the manipulation of that data and there are bioinformatics scientists concerned with the data itself and its biological implicatications. I think a good bioinformatics researcher should be interested in both of these aspects of the field. Another distinction seems obvious to me. Medical informatics generally deals with “gross” data, that is information from super-cellular systems, right up to the population level, while bioinformatics tends to be concerned with information a
