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

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Health Informatics
• Biomedical Informatics

Background:

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

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore congruencies and interdependencies between informatics theory and practice in ACI and MIM publications.
• To identify existing gaps in the literature.
• To assess if the companion journal model successfully bridges informatics theory and practice.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective, prolective observational study.
• Analysis of all publications from ACI and MIM in 2012 and 2013.
• Indexing and analysis of 196 publications (87 from ACI, 109 from MIM).

Main Results:

• MIM publications frequently discussed modeling, methodological, and evaluation approaches for biomedical and health care data, information, and knowledge.
• Key themes included ambient-assisted living, biomedical informatics, health information systems, and decision support.
• While thematic congruencies existed, the focus differed, and interdependencies from practice to theory were limited.

Conclusions:

• Bridging informatics theory and practice is crucial for successful research and application.
• This remains a significant challenge in the field of medical informatics.
• The companion journal model showed limited success in fostering practice-to-theory interdependencies.