Hashimoto,
I got my Master's in BMI last year. It is basically the science of good information collection, delivery and use in biomedicine, which is a sorely needed area. I have friends in business school (specifically Harvard and MIT/Sloan) and I've heard there is a very recent, huge push to get into healthcare fields for the sole purpose of solving Biomedical Informatics problems. Electronic Medical Records, Patient Order Entry issues. This is a huge huge field and medicine will need a ton of experts in this field in the future. The major professional society - AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) just recently designed a new program to train 10,000 medical informaticians by 2010 (i think it is).
My school's got a nice overview of the field (
http://www.dbmi.columbia.edu). There are 4 subfields generally - bioinformatics/genomics, tissue imaging/bioimaging, clinical informatics, and public health informatics. Clinical informatics is the biggest in the field right now, both in need and in academic programs. The electronic medical record is a big issue and with consolidation of hospital resources, this is an important tool for that. BMI is the science behind making this happen (if Hospital #1 codes their cases of heart attacks as "Myocardial Infarction" and Hospital #2 "MI" or "Heart Attack" how do you make them synonymous?). Also, if you have millions of physician notes in free text format, are there ways of making sense of those notes (extracting orders, for example) - this is the field of Natural Language Processing. There's tons of topics that are being studied right now - the list could go on.
As far as careers go, I only know of my colleagues at Columbia. Columbia is more of a theory curriculum, as opposed to Vanderbilt (for example) which is more applied. As such, a lot of people stay within academia, with few examples of moving into industry. It also depends on the school's specialty - clinical informatics or bioinformatics, etc. If you have any other questions, feel free to msg me.
tbo
