NIHI has a growing number of colleagues. Its colleagues, primarily in Canada, are from all sectors of the Health Informatics community. They are in academia, healthcare organizations, industry and government.

Students are crucial to growing Health Informatics. Students are encouraged to join the student arm - the National Student Forum for Health Informatics. For more information, see the National Student Forum.

To facilitate communication and collaboration with NIHI colleagues, a Community of Scholars System has been created and is open to everyone to use. The National Institutes of Health Informatics Community of Scholars (NaCOS) system enables people in industry, academia, government, and healthcare organizations, along with investors and other interested parties to browse and search this directory of Health Informatics talent in various ways. It allows searches by keywords so NIHI experts and their work can be located quickly.

A profile of each NIHI participant can be viewed. The profile includes information on the participant's education, research expertise and interests, publications, awards, and research activity.

With the NaCOS you can:

• browse the profiles of NIHI participants and view information on their expertise, interests, publications, awards, and research activity.
• search for people with expertise in specific areas of Health Informatics.
• search for people who are interested in various areas of Health Informatics.
• search for people by name, location and organization type.
• search for people at a particular organization.
• search for people who are interested in mentoring, volunteering, speaking, consulting, etc.

The development of NaCOS was supported by the Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo.