The terms 'medical informatics' and 'health informatics' have been variously defined, but can be best understood as the understanding, skills and tools that enable the sharing and use of information to deliver healthcare and promote health. 'Health informatics' is now tending to replace the previously commoner term 'medical informatics', reflecting a widespread concern to define an information agenda for health services which recognises the role of citizens as agents in their own care, as well as the major information-handling roles of the non-medical healthcare professions.

Health informatics is thus an essential and pervasive element in all healthcare activity. It is also the name of an academic discipline developed and pursued over the past decades by a world-wide scientific community engaged in advancing and teaching knowledge about the application of information and communication technologies to healthcare - the place where health, information and computer sciences, psychology, epidemiology and engineering intersect.

BMiS is a national association for people concerned with health informatics in both of these senses, and is based on the recognition that practical and scientific concerns in this domain are interdependent and inseparable. Twenty years ago medical informatics was seen largely in terms of the computerisation of healthcare. Today, with computers much more a part of routine daily life, there is a tendency to reduce the specific emphasis on computers and technology in health informatics, and to stress the meanings of information in the everyday work of healthcare professionals, in communication, shared knowledge and decision-making, and in the complex social and functional needs of healthcare organisations and services. There is more scepticism (notably from the professions themselves) about guaranteed benefits from computerisation for the delivery of healthcare, and more emphasis (notably by politicians and managers) on technology and organisation as a single agenda and on 'culture change' as a key item in that agenda. The strategy Information for Health which the UK government announced in 1998 is the most ambitious, considered and widely supported agenda for health informatics ever officially adopted on a national basis. The scope, challenges and problems it offers for health informatics, intellectual and practical, technological and cultural, are daunting and exciting.