I am a first-year masters student at Columbia's Department of Biomedical Informatics. This page explains who I am, the field and the purposes for doing this.

Before coming to Columbia, I worked for five years as and analyst and software developer for The Healthcare Management Council. HMC specialized in financial and managerial consulting for public and private healthcare facilities around the country. During my time there, I developed a database and internal interface for doing all financial analyses and web application for delivering reports and knowledge discovery tools online.

My recieved my bachelor's degree from Colby College in Waterville, ME. I earned a major in Economics and minors in Physics and Computer Science. I also rowed, sang in the Colby Chorale, sang ing and directed the Colby Blue Lights, volunteered as an EMT, and worked for the Outing Club developing a database to track equipment rentals. The year I applied, Colby was named the happiest campus in the country. It was a fabulous experience and recommend the school highly in every regard.

For more detailed information about me or my professional experience, please contact me directly.

This seems to be the standard response when telling people what I am studying. Biomedical Informatics is the study of information uses and needs to the medical and biomedical fields. As with all information technology today, this involves heavy use of modern computer science and information technology.

The department defines it as follows: "Biomedical Informatics is the scientific field that deals with the storage, retrieval, sharing, and optimal use of biomedical information, data, and knowledge for problem solving and decision making. It touches on all basic and applied fields in biomedical science and is closely tied to modern information technologies, notably in the areas of computing and communication."

The applications of Biomedical Informatics fall into four distinct but overlapping fields: clinical informatics, bioinformatics (primarily genetic research), public health informatics, and imaging informatics. The academics behind these fields correlate with these categories, though overlapping techniques mean it is not sensible to study any one field in isolation.

The primary academic organization in the field is the American Medical Informatics Association.

• Theories and Methods in Biomedical Informatics
• Discovery Systems and Decision Support in Biomedicine
• Acculturation to Medicine for Information Specialists
• Management of Information, Communications, and Media Resources (GSB)

• Introduction to Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine
• Theories and Methods in Biomedical Informatics
• Economics of Informatics: Cost and Investment Issues in Healthcare Information Technology
• Database systems (CS)