Why do we need and how can we realize a multi-disciplinary approach to health informatics?

Like no other area, health and social care are characterized by a multi-disciplinary nature. This development gets even stronger by the move towards a personalized, predictive, preventive and participative care paradigm as well as by organizational and technological changes leading to highly distributed care setting realized by multiple stakeholder communities from different policy domains. Those paradigm changes result in growing interoperability challenges when enabling communication and cooperation of all the different actors based on shared knowledge and skills. For meeting those challenges, a systems-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based and policy-driven approach in health informatics education, but also in modeling, implementing and maintaining health informatics interoperability is inevitable. The paper introduces the aforementioned concepts.