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Education Plus
A viable profession for medicos and engineers
S. AISHWARYA
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Biomedical informatics is growing in a big way, but there aren’t many courses geared to meeting the professional requirements in the field.
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“Wide range of medicines demands constant upgrade in software.”
Photo: R. Ashok
Niche area: A. Thanga Prabhu, a Clinical Analyst, in the field of Biomedical Informatics.
The growing demand for human resources in the field of biomedical informatics has brought to the fore the need for crafting academic courses in the field, says A. Thanga Prabhu, a clinical analyst in biomedical informatics.
The emerging field promises a whole lot of job opportunities, but the lack of sufficient educational programmes on the subject in India has been impeding the growth of the industry. But for a couple of institutions which are offering master’s in biomedical informatics, not many have come up with the programme. “Also, the dropout rate in the courses are pretty high, which is what we are seriously concerned about. It is high time, students are made aware of the field,” he says.
Having worked as an emergency surgeon at UAE and completed his M.S. in medical informatics, Dr. Prabhu finds clinical analysis a viable profession for both medicos and engineers. Software on e-prescribing and the like designed by professionals in this field have reduced the complexities involved in hospital administration.
But new breakthroughs in the medical field pose a challenge for medical and technical professionals to update the software. “Wide range of medicines demands constant upgrade in software. When we receive a new list of medicines, we plug it in the software and make it available for the end users,” he explains.
Yet another breakthrough in medical informatics is imaging, a digital mode of capturing the human anatomy. Doing away with the X-ray sheets would mean huge amount of cost- saving. The digital imaging also allows people to store a large amount of images and pull out whenever needed through a network called picture archiving and communication system.
Big players such as Microsoft and Google have got into medical informatics by providing online healthcare services. “Intake is reasonably high in foreign universities with attractive scholarships. Master’s in biomedical informatics teach a bit of medicine to technical graduates and computers to medical professionals.”
In its next annual conference, the Indian Association of Medical Informatics would discuss the need for encouraging institutions to devise a curriculum in this field, which would meet the demand in biomedical informatics, said Dr. Prabhu.
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