Informatics refers to the process of transforming data and information into useful knowledge for professionals in a variety of fields. The advent of the information age has created vast and potentially overwhelming quantities of data, and informatics seeks to harness the power of data science, statistics, and analytics to yield actionable insights as well as data visualizations to present them in an easily-understandable format. Informatics is thus becoming an important part of many industries seeking to use data to meet human needs by improving quality of service or creating new products.
Informatics is perhaps most prominently used in the field of nursing, where nurse informaticists use electronic healthcare data to provide decision support for doctors, streamline reporting, and improve the quality and safety of patient-centered care. It is also increasingly used in materials science, where materials data science and informatics can be used to improve the understanding, use, selection, development, and discovery of materials in the engineering field. And in the realm of biology, bioinformatics is playing an important role in understanding large and complex biological datasets, particularly in the realm of genomics.
