A Survey of the Convergence Between Clinical Informatics and Clinical Engineering

During the past fifty years, developments in science and technology have been achieving significant improvements in the diagnoses and treatment of illness. As a consequence of this development, the clinical engineering field was emerged to handle the increasing number of medical equipment used in today´s hospital. At the beginning, the clinical engineering´s role was to support and advance patient care by applying engineering and management skills to healthcare technology. However, this role is currently expanded to act as stewards of healthcare technologies to address as well the great advances in information technology and its broad applications in medicine. The main goal of this survey is to focus much greater attention on the sate of the art of the convergence between the clinical informatics and clinical engineering in terms of patient safety, health information privacy and security, and patient care devices. These aspects are discussed from the perspective of the integrating healthcare enterprise (IHE) initiative as well as healthcare regulations, such as HIPAA.