Information technology is being increasingly emphasized and widely used in medical institutions. How to utilize information technology to better serve the hospital's medical treatment, scientific research and teaching has become more and more people's concern. Medical informatics has emerged in this context, which is defined internationally as "a discipline involving information processing and information exchange in medical practice, education, and scientific research", and is an emerging cross-discipline of medicine, computer science, artificial intelligence, decision-making, statistics, and information management. Recent advances in medical informatics research include electronic medical records, hospital information systems, decision support systems, imaging information technology, telemedicine and the Internet, and data standards.
The massive application of electronic medical records and cases, and the digitization of medical equipment and instruments, have led to an ever-increasing expansion of the information capacity of hospital databases. However, simply storing information is only the low-end operation of databases, and the integration and analysis of data as well as the automated acquisition of medical decisions and knowledge are the focus of informatics research. To process and analyze data, it must be stored in a specific structured way. Data structures allow computers to easily pass symbols and pixels and greatly increase the speed of information processing. However, this data structure is not determined by input alone; healthcare professionals must have an agreed upon data standard that is recognized by society. This data standard specifies the meaning that special symbols stored in the database have. It acts as a dictionary, serving an advisory and definitional function. Data standards can be further divided into textual standards and information standards.
Textual standards, which are standards that must be expressed in textual form and not as images, are known internationally as medical data systems, and consist of a series of words that have a specific meaning. Aware of the importance of standards, more and more medical and information organizations are involved in the development of this standard. The best known of these are SNOMED, the Standard for Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medical Systems, developed by the American Pathology Association, and ReadCodes, the Standard for Nomenclature of Medical Systems, developed by the U.K.'s Center for Healthcare.
Information standards define both textual and graphical data. The most common information standard in use today is known as HL7 (HealthLevelSeven), which can also be referred to as the Standard Health Information Transfer Protocol, which in turn includes the Digital Imaging and Delivery in Medicine (DICOM) standard.The HL7 standard defines the order and format of information delivery in a database system, covers lab test terminology, drug and equipment purchasing terminology, billing terminology, discharge transfer terminology, and electronic monitoring terminology, etc., and provides a database-like structure that facilitates the transfer of patient information across a variety of data systems such as electronic medical record systems and laboratory systems.
DICOM specifies the format in which images are compressed and encrypted during data streaming and determines how CT images or ultrasound images are stored in the database.