ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to consumer health informatics as an interdisciplinary field in which academia, healthcare practice, the health IT industry, and the federal government are principal players and stakeholders. Medical informatics has been defined as “the field that is concerned with the optimal use of information, often aided by the use of technology, to improve individual health, health care, public health, and biomedical research.” It was identified as a core competency for all healthcare professionals by the Institute of Medicine in 2003. The principal professional organization for biomedical informatics, including the subspecialty of consumer health informatics. The Institute defined it as: the ability to “communicate, manage knowledge, mitigate error, and support decisionmaking using information technology. “Consumer health informatics”, or CHI, is a term for the subfield of informatics that focuses on consumer and patient perspectives, simultaneously as users and beneficiaries of information systems that empower them to manage the own health.
