Bioinformatics and clinical informatics: the imperative to collaborate.

Abstract

In this issue, Perry Miller and Russ Altman review the experiences at Yale and Stanford that have led to a convergence and cross-pollination between clinical informatics and bioinformatics at those institutions. A related convergence is revealed by a MEDLINE search for the string “informatics” in the last five months. Of 346 publications, 175 were in the area of genomics and not clinical applications. Concurrently, there has been much discussion within the informatics community about the dual nature of the research agenda (and, not coincidentally, the funding opportunities) as it pertains to clinical applications and fundamental biological research.1,2 Informal discussions with investigators in bioinformatics and clinical informatics, however, are tinged with concern that these two disciplines in biomedical informatics will diverge or at least that the two investigator communities are not collaborating sufficiently. It may, therefore, be timely to briefly review several major categories in which these two strains of biomedical informatics share common methodological and policy challenges. Moreover, as suggested by this overview, the success of bioinformatics and clinical informatics will depend on joint successes in resolving their mutual challenges. The categories outlined here are by no means intended to exhaustively cover the areas of commonality but are intended to provide a useful reference point for discussions on this topic of increasing relevance to the readership of JAMIA . In less than a decade, the Human Genome project (HGP)3 has generated a large amount of biological data that is likely eventually to lead to a qualitative change in the way in which clinical medicine (diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics) is practiced. A central intellectual and technologic asset to this effort has been GenBank4 and related genomic and protein databases (e.g., the SWISS-PROT,5 Exon-Intron,6 and IMGT databases7). Their standardized data models have allowed research …