From bench to bed: bridging from informatics theory to practice. An exploratory analysis

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Health Information Technology
• Clinical Documentation

Background:

• Applied Clinical Informatics (ACI) launched in 2009 as a companion to METHODS of Information in Medicine (MIM).
• Both journals are official publications of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).
• The journals aimed to bridge informatics theory and practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze congruencies and interdependencies between ACI and MIM publications after five years.
• To identify gaps in the literature and assess the journals' success in bridging theory and practice.
• To report on major topics in ACI and practice-to-theory interdependencies.

Main Methods:

• A retrospective, prolective observational study was conducted.
• Publications from ACI and MIM in 2012 and 2013 were indexed and analyzed.
• A total of 196 publications (87 ACI, 109 MIM) were examined.

Main Results:

• ACI publications focused on care coordination, decision support, provider communication, documentation quality, and health information technology (HIT) implementation.
• Emerging themes in ACI included HIT for predicting admissions, population health management, and mobile health.
• Congruencies in themes were observed, but with differing focuses; practice-to-theory interdependencies were limited.

Conclusions:

• Bridging informatics theory and practice remains a significant challenge.
• The model of companion journals may offer limited support in connecting theory and practice.
• Further research is needed to strengthen the link between clinical informatics research and practice.