Access and effective management of medical information have become increasingly important in the practice of medicine today. Computer technology is developing to achieve this goal. This had led to the emergence of a new specialty, medical informatics, the basic science of the use of computers in medicine. Areas of patient care to which medical informatics has been applied include history taking, medical records, medical data base information retrieval, test performance, test result retrieval, decision support, patient monitoring, medical education, quality assurance and utilization review, medical research, and medical office and financial management. It is important that these applications become integrated with existing medical information systems and that physicians take a leading role in developing and maintaining these systems.