What is CHI?
I sometimes get asked what CHI is, to which I confidently pronounce “Why, it is the Care and Health Informatics Theme”. It’s the follow up question of “So what does that mean?” which is a bit more difficult to answer. Let’s start at the end with that “informatics” word.
Noun(computing) A branch of information science and of computer science that focuses on the study of information processing, particularly with respect to systems integration and human interactions with machine and data. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/informatics)
Now, I find that difficult to interpret, in fact it seems that different countries and disciplines have different definitions of “informatics” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics) which makes this even more difficult to interpret. I think one point we can take away from this is that it has something to do with information and how it is interacted with.
Where there is information there is usually data involved somewhere. Data and information in isolation only gets us so far though, we need to turn that into wisdom. A common visualisation of this progression is –
(https://theifactory.com/news/gaining-wisdom-from-data/)
Those other two letters in CHI stand for “Care” and “Health”. It’s easy to think of GP data or hospital data or care home data being relevant here, and they are, but there is a lot of other relevant data that we use in CHI, including air pollution data or distance to green space (e.g. parks) to name just two.
The route we take on our journey from data to wisdom depends on where we begin and where we want to go – projects looking at prescribing of medications at a population level will need very different data and techniques compared to projects assessing lived experiences of care home residents. This journey is often made more difficult in the care and health setting as data is not freely available (rightly so!), so there may be ten steps, taking years to complete, before data is even available to start working on.
In CHI we work at all the stages of this journey – helping to make data available, making it useful, developing techniques to analyse it and gain wisdom from it. We do this through our involvement in multiple projects with lots of different aims across the ARC themes.
Over the coming weeks we will expand on these concepts and the work we do in CHI, this will cover broad areas such as data, algorithms, and security as well as highlighting some of the projects we are working on. If there are specific topics that you would like us to write about then get in touch and we will see what we can do. If you can’t wait to find out more about CHI, then head over to the Care and Health Informatics (CHI) section!
– Dr Olly Butters, Care and Health Informatics theme.
