Developing informatics as a discipline

Informatics is developing in all of the disciplines related to healthcare. There are many aspects to informatics development which frequently appear to be unrelated and to lack cohesion. This paper builds on the development of a model for nursing informatics and proposes how the components of that model can interact to provide an outline for the development of informatics as a discipline. A understanding of the disciple allows us to organize the existing research and more importantly to understand the areas where research is lacking as the discipline is evolving.