The “Then What” Problem
For those of you involved in the biomedical informatics community, you have probably noticed in the past few years that it is becoming increasingly common for both basic science and clinical investigators to invite informaticians to work with them on their projects. These requests can include assisting teams with the preparation of grant or contract proposals, to engaging in data management and analysis services that support the scientific aims of an ongoing project. One constant that I Ã¥have experienced in this regard, especially in the context of translational research projects (which tend to focus on linking bio-markers or biological models with phenotypic data in order to diagnose a disease or to understand disease progression / treatment outcome), is that the investigator community is often unsure what types of services or support they need from informaticians, other than that they need some sort of “informatics.” In a similar manner, I have found it to be a frequent occurrence that informaticians often have a hard time translating the novel theories, methods, and technologies they have developed or evaluated in order to address the specific problems of an applied research project. I often refer to this as the “then what” problem, as in, now that we have these technologies and methods, and a motivating use case, then what do we do? The reality is that this problem really points out a number of challenges that both the translational research and informatics communities are not doing a particularly good job of addressing, namely: Educating clinical and translational researchers as to the practical capabilities of modern informatics methods and techniques, Educating informaticians as to the realities of the “real translational research world”, Placing and emphasis on (and funding) applied informatics projects that can couple rigorous science, technology development, and real-world use cases, and Ensuring that informatics is understood by funding agencies, organizations, and funding agencies as being both an applied and basic science (usually in a simultaneous fashion), thus requiring it to be more than just a service, and more than just a theoretical exercise. Just some food for thought (which will probably be of particular interest to our colleagues, myself included, who are currently working on the ubiquitous CTSA application). I would be interested in anyones comments on how to address these areas (if you happen to be reading this).