The Impact of Biomedical Informatics

Dr. Frenzel: Biomedical Informatics is a broad and diverse field and its impact is being felt across medicine in amazing sorts of ways these days as medicine has matured over the last fifty or sixty years since the advent of modern medicine What we found is is that healthcare hasn't kept up with technological advantages that have really been able to lever other industries across the United States and across the planet Core to those technologies are computational resources Bringing computational resources to bear in healthcare has been really the seed of explosion in the last 15 or 20 years in modern medicine We're now at an inflection point where we're being able to unlock, at scale, the genomic sequence, the genetic sequence of individuals and begin to have great insight into what those individuals' genetic sequence is doing in terms of their healthcare condition, their pre-existing disease, and their outlook and their future in terms of what diseases are susceptible to who These sort of advances are going to drive pharmacologic advances changes in how we manage healthcare and actually down to the cost equation of how we take care of patients in the United States Biomedical Informatics is critical in leveraging the connection between what we understand as clinical medicine and what we need in computational resources bringing to bare on these problems. The whole field of clinical informatics is critical in bringing these two together so that physicians are to have access to the newest in healthcare information with a scientific basis to help improve practice, improve outcomes.