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Public health informatics is the application of informatics in areas of public health, including surveillance, reporting, and health promotion. Public health informatics, and its corollary, population informatics, are concerned with groups rather than individuals" (Public health informatics, 2013, AMA.). Informatics has a wide range of applications in the field of healthcare. Unlike individualized medicine, public health professionals are interested in how interventions affect groups. For example, a weight loss program might be effective for certain individuals but unless the programs' interventions are demonstrated to be effective in an empirical fashion for a wide range of people, the designers are unlikely to secure funding from a government agency so the program can be offered to Medicaid patients.

Healthcare informatics is noteworthy for its interdisciplinary focus, merging it with medical science. "Informatics researchers develop, introduce, and evaluate new biomedically-motivated methods in areas as diverse as data mining (deriving new knowledge from large databases), natural language or text processing, cognitive science, human interface design, decision support, databases, and algorithms for analyzing large amounts of data generated in public health, clinical research, or genomics/proteomics" (the science of informatics, 2013, AMIA). Public health informatics adds an additional component of 'policy' considerations: the data amassed must not only be relevant and correctly processed to address healthcare issues but also be useful for creating policy health 'prescriptions.' It adds yet another interdisciplinary element to the field: the need to understand the political environment.