From bed to bench: Bridging from informatics practice to theory an exploratory analysis

Background: In 2009, Applied Clinical Informatics (ACI)–focused on applications in clinical informatics–was launched as a companion journal to Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM). Both journals are official journals of the International Medical Informatics Association.

Objectives: To explore which congruencies and interdependencies exist in publications from theory to practice and from practice to theory and to determine existing gaps. Major topics discussed in ACI and MIM were analyzed. We explored if the intention of publishing companion journals to provide an information bridge from informatics theory to informatics practice and vice versa could be supported by this model. In this manuscript we will report on congruencies and interdependences from practice to theory and on major topics in MIM.

Methods: Retrospective, prolective observational study on recent publications of ACI and MIM. All publications of the years 2012 and 2013 were indexed and analyzed.

Results: Hundred and ninety-six publications were analyzed (ACI 87, MIM 109). In MIM publications, modelling aspects as well as methodological and evaluation approaches for the analysis of data, information, and knowledge in biomedicine and health care were frequently raised–and often discussed from an interdisciplinary point of view. Important themes were ambient-assisted living, anatomic spatial relations, biomedical informatics as scientific discipline, boosting, coding, computerized physician order entry, data analysis, grid and cloud computing, health care systems and services, health-enabling technologies, health information search, health information systems, imaging, knowledge-based decision support, patient records, signal analysis, and web science. Congruencies between journals could be found in themes, but with a different focus on content. Interdependencies from practice to theory, found in these publications, were only limited.

Conclusions: Bridging from informatics theory to practice and vice versa remains a major component of successful research and practice as well as a major challenge.