Progress Achieved, Landmarks, and Future Concerns in Biomedical and Health Informatics

The biomedical and health informatics (BMHI) fields have been advancing rapidly, a trend particularly emphasised during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, introducing innovations in BMHI. Over nearly 50 years since its establishment as a scientific discipline, BMHI has encountered several challenges, such as mishaps, delays, failures, and moments of enthusiastic expectations and notable successes. This paper focuses on reviewing the progress made in the BMHI discipline, evaluating key milestones, and discussing future challenges.

To, Structured, step-by-step qualitative methodology was developed and applied, centred on gathering expert opinions and analysing trends from the literature to provide a comprehensive assessment. Experts and pioneers in the BMHI field were assigned thematic tasks based on the research question, providing critical inputs for the thematic analysis. This led to the identification of five key dimensions used to present the findings in the paper: informatics in biomedicine and healthcare, health data in Informatics, nurses in informatics, education and accreditation in health informatics, and ethical, legal, social, and security issues.

Each dimension is examined through recently emerging innovations, linking them directly to the future of healthcare, like the role of artificial intelligence, innovative digital health tools, the expansion of telemedicine, and the use of mobile health apps and wearable devices. The new approach of BMHI covers newly introduced clinical needs and approaches like patient-centric, remote monitoring, and precision medicine clinical approaches.

These insights offer clear recommendations for improving education and developing experts to advance future innovations. Notably, this narrative review presents a body of knowledge essential for a deep understanding of the BMHI field from a human-centric perspective and, as such, could serve as a reference point for prospective analysis and innovation development.