Healthcare informatics and analytics in big data

Healthcare informatics and analytics (HCI&A), also known as healthcare information technology (HIT), healthcare IS (HIS), and so on, has rapidly evolved with the emerge of advanced data analytics technologies applied to the medical domain. Currently, HCI&A has emerged as an important area of study for both practitioners and academic researchers. Accordingly, this emerging field has prompted for an inquiry of the opportunities and challenges related to management of healthcare data, and the application of advanced data analytics to the contemporary healthcare industry. In order to contribute to the literature of healthcare informatics and analytics, this study proposes an HCI&A framework under the context of big data, which covers four important segments such as the underlying technologies, system applications, system evaluations, and emerging research areas. Based on the key features and capabilities of underpinning technologies, the evolution of HCI&A are conceptualized by three stages, namely HCI&A 1.0, HCI&A 2.0, and HCI&A 3.0. By analyzing the technological growth and current research trends, this study outlines the trend map of HCI&A for education and knowledge transfer. We also contributed to conduct a bibliographic study on healthcare informatics and healthcare information systems. To the best of our knowledge, our study is among the very few comprehensive bibliographic studies about HCI&A. We hope that our study can contribute to supplement contemporary thoughts on HCI&A research, and facilitate the related knowledge transfer to the healthcare industry.