The Expanding Informatics Community: Blessing or Curse?

In their introductory comments to the 2001 ACMI Symposium published in this issue, Friedman, Ozbolt, and Masys 1 note that the current fast-moving and turbulent times seem to be both a blessing and curse for biomedical informatics. Never before have so many modifiers appeared next to the term " infor-matics, " as collaborations spread out into an ever-widening array of professional and consumer med-ical/clinical/health fields. Their example of " public health informatics " is only one of dozens of examples that they could have chosen, in which an additional level of informatics specialization has occurred in the health sciences. Adding to the sense of expanding roles and opportunities, informatics teams play an essential role in strategic market needs analysis and in product design, development, and deployment within the clinical and biomedical commercial sectors. None of these features were prevalent in the informatics landscape less than 5 years ago. From the published report, it appears that the initial concern of the conference organizers was how to prevent the field of informatics from fractionating into such small subsegments that nothing remains as a core shared culture that binds and unifies all infor-matics practitioners and investigators. From there, the conference seems to have both embraced the widening scope of informatics and created an overall four-part superstructure in which to place the rapidly expanding disparate pieces together. Thus, although the primary data look scattered, the ACMI conference attendees seemed to find four " clusters " in which to organize the overarching themes for widely disparate biomedical informatics activities. Before commenting on some of the organizing themes that form the major contribution from the conference, I first would like to add a personal perspective on the underlying uneasy sense of " culture lost " or perhaps more appropriate " culture diluted " that motivated the conference initially. The strength of any interdisciplinary activity is also its biggest weakness. Informatics professionals and practitioners bring to the table a highly unique blend of clinical, technical, and methodological skills and assumptions. A blending of the computer scientist, the engineer, the health policy maker, the clinical setting , and the evaluation scientist all went into making the unique beast of the informatician of earlier years. Today we need to add a dash of the molecular biologist, a pinch of the geneticist, a smidgen of the image scientist, and a sprinkle of the cognitive psychologist , and the list keeps …