Creating, distributing, and analyzing heterogeneous biomedical information poses significant challenges for future medical decision-making. With the rapid development of technologies for high-throughput data production, high-speed communication networks, and the potential for enormous distributed databases of medical and biological reference material, it is becoming increasingly clear that sophisticated new software will be required to harness the potential of these vast new sources of information. Images, molecular sequences and structures, gene and protein expression, and patient medical records are often managed and analyzed independently of each other. Although this explosive growth in information enriches biology and medicine, it also raises concerns about current and future practices for software optimization and validation, heterogeneous knowledge integration and the development, interpretation, and regulation of new information technologies, and privacy infringement and the potential misuse of information.
This symposium focuses primarily on the software tools and approaches that will ultimately deliver the benefits of biomedical information technologies to patients at the time and place where decisions are made regarding risk, diagnosis, treatment, and followup. Specifically, this meeting will provide a scientific vision of the future where health care information technologies may be more fully deployed in the clinical workflow to improve efficiency and outcomes. As health care accommodates the individual variation in the population, mass customization using lifelong information records will be needed.
To address this complex array of issues, the NIH Bioengineering Consortium (BECON) and the NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative Consortium (BISTIC) are jointly organizing this symposium, which will bring together software researchers and clinical users who are developing programs to support translational research and clinical decision-making. This symposium will be the seventh in a series of annual conferences coordinated by the BECON and the first joint symposium with the BISTIC.
The symposium format includes four plenary tracks followed by three cross-cutting breakout sessions. The plenary speakers will describe recent progress, but substantial shortcomings, of current systems. They will introduce a vision to address clinical needs that emphasizes the potential benefits of biomedical informatics for health care providers, patients, researchers, and society.
The breakout sessions will identify the expertise and infrastructure needed to satisfy the technological demands for translational research and clinical care, specify what must be done to accomplish these goals, and outline how the work will build on existing technologies to develop new ones to promote success.
In addition to encouraging increased communication among software scientists, the device, drug, and informatics industries, researchers, and clinicians, the symposium will aim to identify major challenges and opportunities that should be addressed by NIH policies and funding programs, including partnerships with the private sector.
