On the current connection and relation between health informatics and social informatics

Smutny, Zdenek (author), Vehovar, Vasja (author)

Scholars from the health and medical sciences have recently proposed the term social informatics (SI) as a new scientific subfield of health informatics (HI). However, SI is not a new academic concept; in fact, it has been continuously used in the social sciences and informatics since the 1970s. Although the dominant understanding of SI was established in the 1990s in the United States, a rich international perspective on SI has existed since the 1970s in other regions of the world. When that perspective is considered, the fields of understanding can be structured into 7 SI schools of thought. Against that conceptual background, this paper contributes to the discussion on the relationship between SI and HI, outlining possible perspectives of SI that are associated with health, medical, and clinical aspects. This paper argues against the multiplication and inconsistent appearance of the term SI when newly used in health and medical sciences. A more explicit name for the area that uses health and social data to advance individual and population health might be helpful to overcome this issue; giving an identity to this new field would help it to be understood more precisely and bring greater separation. This labeling could be fruitful for further segmentation of HI, which is rapidly expanding.

• Language: English
• Keywords: biomedical informatics, conceptual view, clinical informatics, international perspective, medical informatics
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: 8 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 24, no. 9, art. e40547
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-151366
• UDC: 004.7:61
• ISSN on article: 1438-8871
• DOI: 10.2196/40547
• COBISS.SI-ID: 124895235
• Publication date in RUL: 05.10.2023

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Journal of medical internet research
• Shortened title: JMIR, J. med. internet res.
• Publisher: JMIR Publications
• ISSN: 1438-8871
• COBISS.SI-ID: 2406629

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P5-0399
• Name: Internetno raziskovanje

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: Prague University of Economics and Business, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics
• Project number: IP400040