Abstract
Public health epidemiology is the main methods in medicine to study the cause of disease and make it possibly to be prevented in population. The disease will occur if there is interaction among human, epidemic agent (e.g. virus, bacteria, fire, bomb etc) and environment. Therefore we need the update information of the disease to disaggregate it. However the conventional epidemiology sometimes has problems to complete the data due to lack of information and communication. In this study, we propose the medical social informatics framework for epidemic based problems, to prevent the emerging disease and save as many as people alive by satisfying the completeness of information. We merged two theories of epidemiology and social informatics. By using the social informatics framework (Ohta & Yamamoto, 1995), the health problem emergence can be resolved based on three main theory, that, information systems theory, social systems theory and semantics of social information. Those theories can be employed in the epidemiology triangle to disaggregate the interaction among human, epidemic agent and environment, so that the disease can be prevented or treated and disappear gradually. For example, the gene characteristics in the bacteria which living in their environment can be simulated by computer agent based modeling by using bioinformatics (information systems theory). Meanwhile the human interaction with epidemic agent can be analyzed by using social systems theory as well as the interaction between human and environment which will able to be employed by using semantic of social information theory. In conclusion, the medical social informatics framework is a new system thinking methodology to assist public health problem solving and it will be a prompt epidemiology information system to satisfy the completeness information and communication exchange in which the conventional used can not be done.
