Health informatics is pragmatic interdisciplinary managing health related information and still in its initial stage no matter in academic researches or industrial practices. In the past, I met much more failed informatics projects than successful ones. Furthermore, few evidences can prove health information system, such as EHR, CPOE, be able to bring us positive return on investment. Although the computerization of healthcare might not enough to represent all of health informatics, the health/medical informatics is facing the similar barriers as those in healthcare computerization. As a multidiscipline, it is combing an increasing number of domains, not only health and information but also management, sociology, behavior and psychology, cognitive science, politics, etc. There are too many factors to identify which will be the more important or less important ones in a specified project, and these factors are changing over the time. I believe it contributes much on why health information system fails.

Dr. Kaplan agreed this point and elaborated her suggestions of building a health informatician by integration of various domain knowledge and experiences. Dr. Marion J. Ball in an interview two months ago argued nearly 80% projects of healthcare computerization in western countries were failures, and she emphasized the importance of “humanware” for a successful informatics project. Dr. Shortliffe at the celebrating seminar for establishing Biomedical Informatics Department, University of Washington in 2000, had a same point that emphasizing knowledge integration ability of health/medical informatics students.

For informatics doctoral program, there are students in a variety of backgrounds. The interests, experiences and education background of students are various, but a small research on health informatics often requires plenty of knowledge, skills on different fields. Those are too much for one or two informatics students. Finally, students have to commit a lot of trade-offs to bypass even ignore unfamiliar but important points. It may lead to research fallacies even failure. Therefore, if a comprehensive case can enroll several students working together but still keep in individual concentration and interests, the research results might be more positive in-depth and in-width and students can easily learn from each other and cultivate cooperative feeling in informatics area. Moreover, building such a case is an iterative process; the teachers also can learn and get much improvement through it. Once such cases were established, the criteria and standard to enrollment of student and faculty could be steady; moreover, the quality of education would be promising.