Interview
Medical Informatics: A Health Enabler for the Country Health Informatics (HI) basically defines how health information is technically captured, transmitted and utilized. Today new technology is becoming an integral part of medicine, and health informatics is no exception. It is the rapidly developing scientific field that deals with the storage, retrieval and use of biomedical data, information and knowledge for problem solving and decision making.HI focuses on information systems, informatics principles, and information technology as it will be applied for healthcare delivery.
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doctor by profession, Project Director for the National Health Portal of MoHFW, Prof. Suptendra Nath Sarbadhikari, in conversation with Ekta Srivastava, talks about the pros and cons of the medical informatics in the country. You are a versatile personality in medical field. Please share your journey from being a medical doctor to Project Director for the National Health Portal. I am a medical doctor (University of Calcutta, 1989) and have a PhD in Biomedical Engineering (1995) from IT, BHU, Varanasi (now IIT-BHU). Currently
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Governance Today
March 2015
I am associated with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India, as the Project Director for the Centre for Health Informatics of the National Health Portal (NHP) at the NIHFW, New Delhi. I have been the Founder and Director of Supten Institute (offering online courses on health informatics) and a Visiting Professor in Health Informatics at Bangladesh Institute of Health Sciences, (now Bangladesh University of Health Sciences) at Dhaka, Bangladesh. I have been the Founding Director of CAL2CAL
Institute, a faculty member with the Manipal Group, IIT Kharagpur (School of Medical Science and Technology), Amrita group (Course Coordinator for M.Sc. Medical Informatics in AIMS, Kochi and for M. Tech Biomedical Engineering in Amrita University, Coimbatore) and PSG group (Founding Chair of Biomedical Informatics in PSG IMS & R and Visiting Faculty for BME in PSG Tech). Other than that I had done my Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Machine Intelligence Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. My areas of expertise are in