Librarians and informaticians on the health care team

Free full text available on the journal site, along with 29 other intriguing essays in response to the editor's 2011 Question of the Year: "What improvements in medical education will lead to better health for individuals and populations?"

Teaching Physicians to Make Informed Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty: Librarians and Informaticians on the Health Care Team
Moore, Mary; for the Association of Academic Health Sciences Librarians

Academic Medicine. 86(11):1345, November 2011.

doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3182308d7e

From the essay:

As medicine becomes more complex and information technologies transform decision making, physicians must learn not only how to apply new tools and technologies effectively but also new ways of decision making that foster multiple inputs, including team input. Reaching this goal will require informatics education integrated throughout the medical curriculum, faculty role models with searching minds who understand biomedical and health informatics, and continuing education to retrain those who were educated under older models.


Librarians have been envisioning this future since the 1970s, when clinical medical librarians joined health care teams that included students, residents, attending physicians, nurses, nutritionists, and others. In the 1980s, librarians embraced a vision for the future where all health information systems would be connected when at all possible,and they have been working toward that future ever since.