Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, Prague University of Economics and Business, Prague, Czech Republic.
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
J Med Internet Res. 2022 Sep 28;24(9):e40547. doi: 10.2196/40547.
Scholars from the health and medical sciences have recently proposed the term social informatics (SI) as a new scientific subfield of health informatics (HI). However, SI is not a new academic concept; in fact, it has been continuously used in the social sciences and informatics since the 1970s. Although the dominant understanding of SI was established in the 1990s in the United States, a rich international perspective on SI has existed since the 1970s in other regions of the world. When that perspective is considered, the fields of understanding can be structured into 7 SI schools of thought. Against that conceptual background, this paper contributes to the discussion on the relationship between SI and HI, outlining possible perspectives of SI that are associated with health, medical, and clinical aspects. This paper argues against the multiplication and inconsistent appearance of the term SI when newly used in health and medical sciences. A more explicit name for the area that uses health and social data to advance individual and population health might be helpful to overcome this issue; giving an identity to this new field would help it to be understood more precisely and bring greater separation. This labeling could be fruitful for further segmentation of HI, which is rapidly expanding.
健康与医学科学领域的学者最近提出了“社会信息学”（SI）这一术语，将其作为健康信息学（HI）的一个新的科学分支。然而，SI 并不是一个新的学术概念；实际上，自 20 世纪 70 年代以来，它一直在社会科学和信息学中得到持续应用。尽管 20 世纪 90 年代在美国确立了对 SI 的主流理解，但自 20 世纪 70 年代以来，世界其他地区就已经存在着丰富的关于 SI 的国际视角。当考虑到这一视角时，我们可以将理解领域结构化为 7 个 SI 思潮。在这一概念背景下，本文为探讨 SI 与 HI 之间的关系做出了贡献，概述了与健康、医学和临床方面相关的可能的 SI 视角。本文反对在健康和医学科学领域新应用时术语 SI 的倍增和不一致的出现。对于使用健康和社会数据来促进个人和人群健康的领域，一个更明确的名称可能有助于解决这个问题；为这个新领域赋予一个身份将有助于更精确地理解它，并带来更大的分离。这种标记对于 HI 的进一步细分可能是富有成效的，因为 HI 正在迅速扩展。
