Are doctors facing a digital health divide?

The head of the American Medical Informatics Association, Edward Shortliffe, MD PHD, is calling for medical education to add biomedical and health informatics to the basic disciplines covered in medical school. Such a domain of knowledge would be "the interdisciplinary, scientific field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving, and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health," Dr. Shortliffe writes in the September 15th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A tall order, but certainly necessary in our increasingly information driven health and health care fields. Clinicians and the disciplines that support them and their patients are increasingly turning to digital aids to manage information, communicate, and answer complex questions. Shortliffe envisions four major application areas:

* Bioinformatics  (dealing with the cellular and molecular)

* Imaging informatics (looking at tissues and organs)

* Clinical informatics (related to patient care)

* Public health informatics (for the health of populations)

In addition to knowing how to manage the increasingly complex information systems they will encounter in their clinical health practices, new doctors need to be aware of resources that exist online and elsewhere. Even the appropriate usage of personal devices such as iPads and Blackberry's, and where it is appropriate and useful to use them. Doc's also need to develop awareness of information resources that their patients are using, and how to educate patients about how to differentiate between good and not-so-good sources of online health information.

All in all it's a worthy call. This shouldn't be a call for replacing the need for empathetic listeners comfortable with hands -on, hearts-on care, but simply a realization that a working knowledge of how to evaluate and manage information and information systems is a necessary skill for health practitioners in the 21st century.