JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

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. While the dominant understanding of SI was established in the 1990s in the US, a rich international perspective on SI has existed since the 1970s in other regions of the world. When that is considered, the fields of understanding can be structured in seven SI schools of thought. Against that conceptual background, this article 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. The article 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 could be fruitful for further segmentation of HI, which is rapidly expanding.