What exactly is medical informatics? It can be described as “the scientific field that deals with the storage, retrieval and optimal use of information and data. Rapid development is due to advances in computing, communication technology and an increasing awareness that the knowledge base of medicine is essentially unmanageable by traditional paper-based methods.” 
                                       
            An example of how fast medical informatics is growing, we can take a look at some results found by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “Over the past 40 years, medical information has grown at an astonishing rate. For example, MEDLINE®, a database that contains references to articles in the biomedical literature and is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, added more than 460,000 references over the past year. This makes it virtually impossible for physicians to keep up with the large amount of information that results from clinical trials and other studies, information that they could be using to guide their medical decisions.”  Another problem is actually getting the information together and actually understanding what it means. 

~The IPRO-372 Fall 2004 Team