Medical informatics and medical education in Canada in the 21st century

The advances of health informatics over the last 50 years are briefly sketched to reveal the pervasiveness of their applications in health and health care. The relations to research in health informatics and health are pointed out. From this perspective it is argued that the evolution of consumer health informatics in the last decade has had a profound impact on the practice of medicine, on patient-physician relations and, hence, on the requirements for medical education. The different access to information and how it is used in educational environments will also dramatically affect how curricula are structured both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The impact of health informatics on medical education is further elaborated, and the requirements on infrastructure in support of this education are detailed. This infrastructure goes beyond instructional laboratories and includes academic units for medical informatics and, most importantly perhaps, funding resources and adjudication capacity for health informatics research and their integration into the Canadian research organization and the new Canadian Institutes of Health Research.