Summary
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.
Citation: Haux R, Lehmann CU. From bed to bench: Bridging from informatics practice to theory
– an exploratory analysis. Appl Clin Inf 2014; 5: 907–915
http://dx.doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2014-10-RA-0095
Keywords
Biomedical informatics - health informatics - clinical informatics - medical informatics
- serial publications