| Introduction |
The Department of Medical Informatics was inaugurated in 1999 at Kyungpook National University School of Medicine. The department has been recorded as the first academic medical Informatics curriculum in Korea before the turn of the 21st century. The faculty initially consisted of Drs. Yun Sik Kwak and Hune Cho, and Dr. Ho-young Chung joined the department when Dr. Kwak retired.
The department has been committed to educating highly knowledgeable, informative physicians who will take full responsibility for the healthcare information technology (IT) in the global healthcare networking. The department offers a unique graduate program for both MS and Ph.D degrees, which seeks to enhance IT applications to all aspects of medicine. To achieve multidisciplinary objectives in health care, we must continuously be able to refine and balance between scientific discipline and art of medicine so that medical informatics stays current and up to date for clinical innovations. To accomplish these missions, the faculty and alumni should be able to pursue proactive roles to be frontiers in a broad spectrum of IT based biomedical researches - clinical and translational investigation, health policy, and industrial collaborations.
The medical informatics training program in KNU is recognized as one of the most rigorous convergence programs for informatics in the nation, which nowcasts a reference model for other medical institutes. Our faculty and graduates have granted several major national projects such as “Development and implementation of HL7 Interface Engine” and “Interoperable Electronic Health Record.” Though a few, not so many, graduates completed with degrees (MS, PhD) are found to have key positions in academia, hospitals, government, and many health related industry. The essence of medical informatics lies in a nomadic spirit that invades unprecedented territories in cyberspace per se, no one has ever been before. Because the incessant challenge is the canonical characteristics of IT and medicine, the department is looking forward to harvesting synergistic outcomes with great anticipation. 
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