These are exciting times for a career in informatics: not only are there a multitude of advertised jobs, but employment opportunities have grown from a relatively small academic community to a large diverse community including government, commercial, and non-profit organizations. What was once considered an ‘exotic’ career for those in health sciences who were passionate about computation (or for those in quantitative sciences who were passionate about health sciences) has become an essential profession that is impacting healthcare and biomedical science in an unprecedented way. Therefore, trained professionals to fill informatics positions are now in high demand.
In this issue of JAMIA, we honor some of our distinguished informatics colleagues who were elected to the American College of Medical Informatics in 2010 and 2011 (see page 920). These professionals have continued to contribute to the informatics field for over 10 years. We also report on the core competencies for graduate education in biomedical informatics (see page 931), which have expanded significantly in the past decade. This long-term, graduate education is training a new generation to become our future leaders. Simultaneously, short-term programs, such as undergraduate and certificate programs, are serving the need to rapidly fill gaps in the current work force.
Informatics research and development have also expanded in the past decade. Foundational informatics research occurs in all sectors (academia, industry, and government), and applications are utilized across the board. In this issue, we present some clear examples of how practical applications of informatics, such as clinical decision support (see pages 942, 980, 995, 1003) and surveillance systems (see pages 988, 1011, 954, 1075, 1103, 939), are impacting quality of care in our healthcare system. Physician use of social media is reported in a brief communication (see page 960). We also report on how secondary use of clinical data for research can provide important insights for healthcare quality improvement (see page 965), and how telemonitoring technology improves glycemic control (see page 973). We include reports on improvements in electronic health record (EHR) systems (see pages 1043, 1050, 1032, 1019, 1025, 1089), strengths and weaknesses of electronic prescribing (see page 1059) and describe preparatory work for EHR system implementation in a developing country (see page 1039).
The field of informatics has also expanded to include new sub-areas, which have been increasingly featured in JAMIA—translational bioinformatics (see pages 1095, 1066) and clinical research informatics (see page 1110), including a report on a how a biorepository information system was integrated with a commercial EHR system (see page 1115). Additionally, we report on a model of financial effects of health information exchange (see page 1082).
As evidenced by this issue of JAMIA, those who are starting an informatics career, in addition to those currently in the field, have a large array of opportunities. We look forward to their future contributions to biomedical informatics and to publishing these contributions in JAMIA.