The case for including medical informatics in medical, nursing, and public health school curricula

It is difficult to find time in the medical curriculum for teaching medical informatics in the face of ever expanding course requirements. Horizontal integration with current topics appears to be the most realistic way to include it. Since medical informatics teaches health professionals to streamline the handling of voluminous medical information, it may have claim to a special priority. In several European countries, medical informatics is federally mandated as a part of the medical curriculum. Without it, the ever increasing extent to which clinics, wards, and offices are being computerized can pose problems for newly graduated health professionals. This is especially true for nurses who often have to face patient-monitoring equipment on their own. In spite of the excellent efforts of the National Library of Medicine to train medical informatics professionals, the lack of teaching staff is still a factor in the slow adoption of the discipline. An inclusion of a specialization in medical informatics in more schools of public health curricula could be helpful in this regard.