HEALTH AND MEDICAL INFORMATICS EDUCATION - INTRODUCTION

Health and medical informatics education has meanwhile gained consider able importance for medicine and for health care. Specialized programs in health/medical informatics have therefore been established within the last decades. This special issue of Methods of Information in Medi cine contains papers on health and medical informatics education. It i s mainly based on selected papers from the 5th Working Conference on H ealth/Medical Informatics Education of the International Medical Infor matics Association (IMIA), which was held in September 1992 at the Uni versity of Heidelberg/Technical School Heilbronn, Germany, as part of the 20 years' celebration of medical informatics education at Heidelbe rg/Heilbronn. Some papers were presented on the occasion of the 10th a nniversary of the health information science program of the School of Health Information Science at the University of Victoria, British Colu mbia, Canada. Within this issue, programs in health/medical informatic s are presented and analyzed: the medical informatics program at the U niversity of Utah, the medical informatics program of the University o f Heidelberg/School of Technology Heilbronn, the health information sc ience program at the University of Victoria, the health informatics pr ogram at the University of Minnesota, the health informatics managemen t program at the University of Manchester, and the health information management program at the University of Alabama. They all have in comm on that they are dedicated curricula in health/medical informatics whi ch are university-based, leading to an academic degree in this field. In addition, views and recommendations for health/medical informatics education are presented. Finally, the question is discussed, whether h ealth and medical informatics can be regarded as a separate discipline with the necessity for specialized curricula in this field. In accord ance with the aims of IMIA, the intention of this special issue is to promote the further development of health and medical informatics educ ation in order to contribute to high quality health care and medical r esearch.