Nations face significant challenges in realizing sustainable, quality health systems. Health Informatics has been recognized as a discipline that has enormous potential in delivering solutions that will help designers and planners to re-engineer the health system as a modern knowledge enterprise and to assist and augment the efforts of care providers, administrators, and patients themselves in realizing an adequate level of efficiency and effectiveness. However, many needed solutions to the challenges faced by the health system do not yet exist or are incomplete or immature, and often the full understanding of the breadth and depth of these challenges is elusive.

The National Institutes of Health Informatics (NIHI) will be dedicated to fostering academic and industrial research and development as well as advanced Health Informatics educational programs with the objectives of:

• comprehensively understanding the challenges faced by the health system.
• fostering research and development of Health Informatics solutions.
• facilitating their rapid and effective deployment.
• providing evidence of their effectiveness.

NIHI organizes Health Informatics researchers locally into institutes or centers in Health Informatics specialty areas and integrates these local institutes through a national organization. NIHI combines these focused entities into a potent collaboration that matches the depth and breadth of the challenges faced by the health system with the broad range of capabilities needed to fully address the challenges.