How health informatics is helping to address the healthcare system’s challenges

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Speaker: Dr. Jacob Krive, Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences

Summary: Learn how health informatics is helping to address some of the healthcare system’s challenges by introducing new ways to bring medical and computer science together through technology.

Dr. Jacob Krive, Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences at UIC, shares his insight on how health informatics is going beyond the basics of electronic medical records to analyzing that data.

Learn more about UIC’s health informatic programs.


Some of the challenges that healthcare industry is facing in terms of technology is that there is a knowledge gap where there is a need for new tools and new ways of approaching safety and healthcare outcomes research in improvements in patient and provider satisfaction. The old fashioned utilities have run out of steam in this case. This is where biomedical informatics helps by introducing new ways of bridging medical and computer sciences and moving the progress forward and assisting providers, patients, and everyone who is involved in patient care with making sense out of all of this complexity that’s happening in healthcare by providing either technology support or recommendations. There are two main pathways that are happening. One is the streamlined main informational pipe of storing primary data in electronic medical records and the wave of digitization of records, which is still on ongoing, but it’s in the process of maturation, when a majority of the early failures of attempting to bring electronic medical records to life have already succeeded. Now, we’re trying to make it better to turn it towards usability and make it more comprehensive so we can go beyond the basics. The other line that’s emerging today is that we can analyze secondary posted electronic medical records data. This is opening up new opportunities, both in job markets for potential job seekers as well as healthcare organizations. There is a slew of providers and vendors that have never been in the market today that are coming with other knowledge sets and trying to reapply them in different ways to healthcare.