Bioinformatics is distinct from medical informatics – the interdisciplinary study of the design, development, adoption and application of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management and planning. Somewhere in between the two disciplines lie biomedical informatics – the interdisciplinary field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific enquiry, problem solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health.
Recently initiated projects, such as the 100,000 Genomes Project, are bridging the gaps between these disciplines whole bioinformatics deals with research data and uses it for research purposes, medical informatics deals with data from individual patients for the purposes of clinical management, (diagnosis, treatment, prevention...) and biomedical informatics attempts to bridge these two extremes.