Healthcare Informatics is often defined as the application of information technology in the health and healthcare domain.  No longer the exclusive province of academia, healthcare informatics is now increasingly applied to improving health outcomes for individuals and populations, and solving real problems in care delivery, case and population management, and healthcare business. 

Much of healthcare informatics now involves the design and development of information systems used in care delivery and management, healthcare administration and financing, and the supporting education, research and industry segments of the healthcare domain.  A growing body of experience shows that these systems are most effectively, efficiently, and economically developed when these are:

• directly linked to the organization's business, care delivery mission, or clinical functions,

• comply with standards and industry best practices,

• use a model-driven architecture and development process, and

• employ a formal life cycle management methodology.

The how's, when's and why's of architecture and modeling are as key and essential to the development of modern healthcare information systems as traditional considerations like life cycle management.  With the increasing complexity and scope of enterprise transactional systems, electronic health records and clinical repositories, and analytical systems such as clinical data warehouses, information architecture and modeling often become the make-or-break issues in system development.