What is Informatics?

In·for·mat·ics (Webster's)
Pronunciation: "in-f&r-'ma-tiks
noun, plural but singular in construction : the gathering, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of recorded information.

The term was coined as a combination of "information" and "automation", to describe the science of automatic information processing. The morphology—informat-ion + -ics—uses "the accepted form for names of sciences, as politics, geriatrics, mathematics, etc. - Oxford English Dictionary

Medical Informatics (MI) is the study of information processing as it is used in healthcare. It might have been called medical computing, but the French-derived term informatique [coined by Phillipe Dreyfus in 1962] is more commonly used internationally and probably conveys a broader set of concerns, including the uses and flows of information that may have little to do with computers. Like many engineering fields, MI has scientific aspects that focus on the description, modeling and interpretation of how information is actually generated, disseminated and used, and underlying constraints or natural laws that govern these activities. MI is also deeply concerned with design of appropriate medical information processing systems, with tradeoffs in their implementation, and with ways to evaluate their effectiveness. — MIT

Telemedicine (or the recent European coinage telematique) focuses on one aspect of MI, access to and use of medical information at a distance.  — MIT

Other areas of medical informatics include clinical informatics, pharmacy informatics, public health informatics, imaging informatics, dental informatics, Bioinformatics, biodiversity informatics, cheminformatics, consumer health informatics, community informatics, business informatics, legal informatics, geoinformatics, laboratory informatics, neuroinformatics, clinical research informatics, social informatics, bioinformatics and nursing informatics. Health Informatics can be defined as the joining of information technology and healthcare.