Academicians from Lifesciences and Pharmaceutical experts who have participated in an international conference on Bio-Medical Informatics, have held that there is urgent need to strengthen the researches in the areas of bioinformatics and health informatics, two components of biomedical informatics. They emphasized that the recent advances in these two areas had opened more opportunities for improving human health than ever before.

According to them this development makes the health sector including the pharmaceutical industry face unique challenges to better understand and utilize the vast amount of available data in order to develop cost-effective solutions and products. While inaugurating the conference PWC Davidar, IT secretary of Tamil Nadu government said with vast amount of information being generated due to advancement in these fields, there arises a need to effectively control and manage the information so generated. While approving that the resources of Information Technology has become a critical factor in pharmaceutical research and development, he said, it helps to find out new and better drugs with the introduction of new approaches to the design, synthesis, screening and optimization of drug candidates.

Dr G Ravindran, president, Biomedical Engineering Society of India said in bioinformatics the real long term value lies in converting the data into useful therapeutics and hence efforts are on to make the bioinformatics tools as standardized and easy as possible. He said Health Informatics, another component, covers the organization and management of information in the areas of patient care, education, research and administration. In future there will be a combination of pharmaceutical and computing firms bringing together their researches as well as IT capabilities. Dr Ravindran further said recognizing biomedical informatics as central to accelerating drug design and discovery, the big pharmaceutical and biotech firms are expected to invest heavily in internal capabilities or meet their needs through outsourcing.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Sriram, head of department of Bio-medical Engineering, SSN College said, the current health informatics researches may have greater implications for the practice of medicine than medical informatics ever did before. He said after decades of development of information systems designed primarily for physicians and other health care managers and professionals, there is an increasing interest in reaching consumers and patients directly through computers and telecommunications systems. Consumer health informatics is the branch of medical informatics that analyses consumers' preferences into medical information systems.

The conference was conducted by Sri Sivasubramania Nadar (SSN) College of Engineering on the theme 'Healthcare for the 21st century', in association with Sai BioSciences Research Institute Pvt Ltd and UMDNJ (University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey), USA .

Biomedical informatics is an emerging discipline underlying the acquisition, maintenance, retrieval and application of knowledge and information in research, education, and service in health-related basic sciences, clinical disciplines, and health care administration.