Are Medical Informatics and Nursing Informatics Distinct Disciplines?

The 1999 debate of the American College of Medical Informatics focused on the proposition that medical informatics and nursing informatics are distinctive disciplines that require their own core curricula, training programs, and professional identities. Proponents of this position emphasized that informatics training, technology applications, and professional identities are closely tied to the activities of the health professionals they serve and that, as nursing and medicine differ, so do the corresponding efforts in information science and technology. Opponents of the proposition asserted that informatics is built on a re-usable and widely applicable set of methods that are common to all health science disciplines, and that “medical informatics” continues to be a useful name for a composite core discipline that should be studied by all students, regardless of their health profession orientation.