Identifying main research areas in Health Informatics as revealed by papers presented in the 13th world congress on Medical and Health Informatics

to identify the main research areas in health informatics is an important goal for specialists in the discipline. the proposals of the think tank at oatley (2005) are one of the outstanding examples in this direction. with the aim of finding the main areas of scientific production in health informatics, the 284 oral presentations included into the program of the 13th world congress on medical and health informatics (medinfo'2010) held in cape town in september 2010, were analyzed. twelve of the 13 areas identified in oatley were present, being the most salient: computer science for health informatics (61 papers); toolkit and systems (35);people in organizations (23);politics and policy (21);health informatics standards (21 papers).nineteen papers did not fit into oatley's classification, including the areas of bioinformatics (6) and mining of biomedical literature (6).this study on one hand points to the importance of theoretical aspects for our discipline's body, and, on the other hand, suggest the need of similar studies at larger scales.