Providers of healthcare Health care for patients

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1.3 Development of Healthcare Information

This segment will focus briefly on the evolution of bioinformat- ics and healthcare over the past few decades. For thousands of years, medical science has gone through constant development compared to IT which is a relatively newly emerged topic that commenced from the invention of the first computer in circa 1936 by Konrad Zuse. Right after the emergence of computers, comes in information storage devices. Computer networking whereby computers are linked together in a network made health informatics possible. It all started after World War II where tech- nology is made more available and the health informatics concept just appeared. This provided an opportunity for connecting hospi- tals together in the cyber world and recent development of com- putational intelligence has made a variety of services accessible. The collaboration of information technology, multimedia tech- nology and health has made health maintenance and life-saving easily achievable. Figure 1.3 depicts technology supporting a wide variety of healthcare and medical services. Figure 1.3 Telemedicine supports a range of applications FONG et al 2011 12 Ever since The Radio Doctor was launched eight decades ago, there are various links between medicine and technology in almost all areas of healthcare practices. As the development of the health informatics from the first computer has been briefly explained we should now focus on recent developments that have the potential for further progress. Privacy and security are one of the major problems that many would be debated. Cases of personal information of patients being exposed are caused by security breach and lots of storage devices. The most crucial aspect of health informatics is making sure that the security and privacy of personal information including pro- tection against information alteration or stealing and policy assurance that states that the information will not be abused by any parties including those who have access to the patient’s records. Apart from assuring the privacy and safeguarding the medical data, other matters need to be addressed also as health infor- matics involves a wide variety of topics that associate re- sources, people and devices which are developing and progressing independently continuously. In the USA during 1950s, Robert Ledley initiated a dental project, which marks the earliest record of modern informatics arrangement. It was done for the National Bureau of Standards which is now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Ledley, 1965, ZAHN et al 1972, LEHNER et al 1998. The next couple of years saw more new medical information systems being developed in USA and most of the programmers are developed independently. Therefore, it is not feasible to develop a standard for health informatics systems. In 1967, the International Medical Informatics Association IMIA was founded to manage the progress of health informatics and as- sociated advancement in technology. Shortly after the for- mation of IMIA, the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System language MUMPS was devel-