Highlights from the AMIA 2009 Spring Congress
This past week saw a tremendously productive and invigorating AMIA Spring Congress meeting in Orlando, Florida. During the meeting’s CRI track, a broad variety of topics were covered, from the development of a “human studyome” database, to practical approaches that could be employed to enable the selection and deployment of clinical trial management systems or similar software platforms. A number of cross-cutting themes emerged during the meeting, which I believe will be of interest to readers of this blog, namely:
An emphasis on systems-level approach to CRI: This really was evident in a consistent evolution in thinking from “I think I can” to “I think we can” type project (not quite hypothesis-driven science, but a step in the right direction). In particular, there was a fairly consistent inclusion of socio-technical, workflow, and human factors evaluations relative to the programmatic efforts and study designs that were presented. Perhaps the best news in this area was an even greater emphasis on the development of readily adoptable tools However, despite these positive factors, This transition is still clearly in its early phases
Important work is taking place outside of conventional CRI-centric consortia (CTSA, caBIG, etc.): This was particularly true when looking a the work being presented by international and multinational teams. Most, if not all such efforts were independent or relatively small scale (e.g., single sites, small “grass roots” consortia). There was a strong consensus that current national-scale efforts in the U.S. may be creating silos of translation, rather than enhancing national infrastructures and approaches.
There is a clear movement towards integration of available research information management, analysis, and dissemination platforms into “pipelines”: Such efforts are again largely happening in self-organized collaborative groups motivated by scientific use cases.
And finally, and perhaps more importantly, there was an Increasing maturity shown by CRI researchers in the context of CRI being a distinct discipline of biomedical informatics: However, it was also clear that there is still a need for progress towards a state where CRI researchers not only ask questions, but also answer them.
On a final note, it was exciting to see a strong convergence of thinking, research, and development around a set of common CRI theory and practice themes, as is illustrated in the impromptu figure below.
If you have any thoughts or comments to share about the AMIA 2009 Spring Congress – please share them with your colleagues here!
