Health care has always been concerned about information management, especially as health care interventions and management have become increasingly complex. In spite of this, health care has weakly welcomed information technology into its midst, shunning computerized data management systems in favor of anachronistic and antiquated ones. When health care started using information technology, the role informatics played was largely ancillary. There were few specialists, and informatics were considered novel and strange. Yet since Virginia Saba introduced technology specifically designed for healthcare, the informatics field has become one of the most relevant to the gamut of healthcare management and operations. Currently, healthcare informatics stands alone as a unique area of specialization that fuses passion for health care management, concern for patient care, and computer technology.

There are five major milestones in the creation and evolution of health informatics. The first was the initial first wave of computing and information technology that...
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