At the University of Washington we define the field of Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI) broadly, engaging students and faculty in a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Our research and training span a continuum of overlapping areas including biological, clinical, and population research.  In addition to advancing the field of BHI itself, we are committed to contributing to the theory and practice of computing and information science, biomedical research, clinical care, consumer health, and public health.  We also place an emphasis on translational informatics, the interaction of people and technology, and humanistic values in our work.

For our teaching, we emphasize the following cross-cutting themes, which highlight our view of the field: 

• Understanding information problems and needs of people in biomedicine and health
• Representing, using/applying, computing and reasoning with incomplete, uncertain, and dynamic biomedical and health knowledge and data
• Integrating, managing, sharing, and visualizing ever growing amounts of biomedical and health data and systems
• Creating information systems that are useful for and usable by people, organizations and society, and that account for their behavior and values
• Evaluating and validating methods, models, tools, and systems

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) also provides a nice definition of biomedical & health informatics.

The UW BHI program is a charter member of AMIA's Academic Forum.