Study on the Evolution & Basic Status of Professional Education of Traditional Chinese Medicine Informatics in China

Abstract

This study was aimed to summarize regularities and reflect basic status for professional education in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Informatics in China. Based on the locale research results carried out recently for 3 years by School of Information Engineering in Hubei university of TCM, a vast amount of information was further collected by interviewing with experts in TCM informatics education, or from official websites of TCM institutes. And then, we made a retrospective analysis on the TCM Informatics education development from aspects, such as specialty, cultivation specification, discipline construction, laboratory construction and as well as enrollment plan. The results indicated that the professional education in TCM Informatics had obtained fast development for the latest 20 years, which could be probably divided into three stages, including start-up stage, exploratory stage and developmental stage, and characters for each stage were obvious as follows: a) professional settings and cultivation mode gone formalized; b) cultivation scale tended to be stable; c) academic discipline construction was promoted along with the deepened multi-disciplinary integration. However, significant differences still existed in educational resources and cultivation quality compared with social requirement. It drawn a conclusion that the development modal must be shift from extensive development to intensive development, so as to outstand the characteristics and advantages more distinctly, which should be the right way for the professional education in TCM informatics for the next decade.