Overview

Informatics has become a major theme and methodology for biomedical science as well as for health care delivery, public health, consumer health, and health care education. Broadly speaking, the term informatics connotes the area of activity relating to the convergence of (1) a variety of technological/quantitative disciplines – among them computer and information sciences, probability/statistics, and cognitive science – with (2) an application domain. In biomedicine, the application domains cover the entire spectrum of biomedical phenomena and processes, at every level of biological scale. They also cover a spectrum of foci of activity, including research, translation, practical application, analysis, production, and management.

Biomedical Informatics (BMI) is an umbrella term that refers to these spectra both of biological scale and focus of informatics activity. Because of the vast scope of BMI, biomedical scientists and informatics investigators have tended to come together around particular foci. Most commonly, foci have been at particular levels of the biological scale: molecular (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), tissue/organ system (e.g., imaging), organism/ individual (e.g., clinical practice, clinical research, health systems management), and population (e.g., preventive medicine, public health, biosurveillance). Sometimes the unifying themes of a research focus have instead been major biomedical systems or processes, e.g., neurosciences, oncology, behavioral medicine, developmental biology, or pharmacotherapeutics.

As foci have developed, largely the result of a self-organizing process, subdisciplines have formed around some of these foci and have been given their own names, e.g., bioinformatics, computational biology, clinical informatics, public health informatics, imaging informatics, and neuroinformatics. They have in some cases spawned their own curricula, degree programs, and training opportunities.

Owing to the breadth of opportunities for specialization, training in biomedical informatics presents individuals with many possible career paths. At least three components of training are necessary. (1) To accommodate the diversity of backgrounds of trainees who are entering the field requires that trainees acquire certain competencies they may be lacking. This tends to differ from one type of trainee to another, for example, with respect to prior biomedical or computing experience, and thus must be customized to the needs of various types of entering trainees. (2) There is a common core of knowledge, skills, and experiences that all trainees need to have to equip them to be true multidisciplinary professionals. Because of the breadth of BMI, trainees must also become sufficiently conversant with areas within the field other than those in which they will later focus, so as to be able to work effectively in an interdisciplinary environment. One way to accomplish this is through a deliberate and continual “acculturation” experience. Methods to encourage interaction include traditional ones such as colloquia, symposia, and other educational experiences, as well as an emphasis on identification of collaborative opportunities and stimulation of joint research at the intersections of the subdomains. (3) To develop research careers, trainees need to focus on a subset of the domain of BMI through concentration and specialization.