Recognising e-Health as Part of a Cohesive Professional Community

This paper identifies a mechanism for specific professional registration in order to sustain a holistic community fit to practice in informatics to support the health domain. It considers risks and opportunities that have an international resonance, and comments on the areas where multi-national activity could provide additional impetus to improvement of the quality of the profession of health informatics overall. It puts the case for the over-arching term health informatics to be used to maximize synergy and drive up quality, whilst still recognising the specificity and place for more focused descriptive terms. Whilst grounded in the contemporary UK environment, the principles explored in this paper are currently being considered for adoption internationally.