This is a very special year for JAMIA, which was founded 20 years ago by Dr William Stead, Editor-in-chief from 1994 to 2002, and subsequently led by Dr Randolph Miller, Editor-in-chief from 2003 to 2010. Following the steps of these remarkable editors, we strive to produce a balanced journal whose articles represent the best work in our field. Consistent with JAMIA's mission of publishing prime informatics articles after rigorous peer-review, and also consistent with JAMIA's vision of disseminating biomedical and health informatics work, our goal is to continue to expand our readership so this work reaches out to a broad audience in the USA and abroad. Our readers come from different backgrounds and represent important driving forces in informatics, healthcare, and biomedical science. Regardless of whether they are academic-, government-, or industry-based, research- or application-focused, skilled in technical or non-technical aspects of informatics, decision makers, creators, implementers, or evaluators, our readers are seeking information that will transform the way they go about their daily businesses. JAMIA's responsibility is to provide them with high quality information.
The collective influence of our readers in shaping the future of healthcare through changes in technical, sociological, or policy-related issues is enormous, particularly at a time when relevant changes in healthcare policy, in public engagement, and in the global economy are all happening simultaneously and are highly dependent on technology. We are fortunate to live in a time when it is possible to find out what people want, develop technology that can be delivered to fit their needs, and implement policy that can help deliver this technology when and where it is most needed. As we are living through these changes now, it may be hard for us to notice them, but 20 years from now we will look back and understand how much was changed and what a critical role informatics had in advancing healthcare and biomedical science. This important period of unprecedented growth in informatics is reflected in JAMIA articles that not only document scientific innovations, but also drive discussion on what kind of innovation is needed and how it should be deployed in real settings.
We are often asked what kind of articles are within scope of the journal. JAMIA is a generalist journal in biomedical informatics: we value innovations in informatics that constitute (A) novel methods or approaches to solve difficult problems, (B) original applications that result in new knowledge, (C) reviews that synthetize the literature and provide insightful discussion of timely topics (eg, systematic reviews when the literature is mature enough, scoping reviews for less mature literature, tutorials on ‘must-know’ topics of high significance to our readers), (D) generalizable case reports describing how an institution or group of investigators successfully addressed a significant problem, (E) brief communications on highly innovative projects, (F) insightful perspectives that spark discussion on critical topics, (G) invited editorials that help contextualize journal issues that have a special focus, or (H) correspondence that documents controversy in areas of high interest and relevance.
In this issue of JAMIA, we present a large array of article categories. In Perspectives, Gaynor (See page 2) starts with a provocative opinion on how common carrier and neutrality principles that are applicable to the telecommunication industry should apply to the nationwide health information network. Huser (See page 8) advocates for electronic health record (EHR) donation for research, and Rudin (See page 13) presents a vision for care coordination using EHRs. In Brief Communications, Kang (See page 17) describes the impact of social media in cardiovascular care, Gupta (See page 23) assesses the accuracy of clinician-reported data in clinical decision support, Khor (See page 27) describes a smoking detection system that uses a small training corpus, and Kim (See page 31) evaluates a novel system that enhances phenotype-based searches in dbGaP (See page 31). In Case Reports, Garrido (See page 181) studies publicly reported e-Measures of healthcare quality, and Hurdle (See page 185) describes a single center's experience in implementing infrastructure for hosting research data. In Reviews, Abraham (See page 154) and Topaz (See page 163) systematically report on the literature related to hand-off tools and the Omaha system, respectively, while Schoenbill (See page 171) discusses ethical, logistical and technological considerations when handling genetic data in EHRs. Correspondence from Gospodarevskaya (See page 190) calls for a framework for categorizing economic evaluations of health information systems, a topic that has experienced a significant rise in JAMIA publications in the past few years. Finally, a diverse set of Research and Applications articles address important topics such as organization and quality of electronic health data (See pages 49, 64, 82, 90, 97, 111), users’ perspectives (See pages 37, 56, 73, 117, 146), policy (See page 111), and various topics in data mining and clinical decision support (See pages 105, 132, 139, 146).
It is currently not possible to publish all materials that some segments of the JAMIA readership could be interested in. The editorial team has to prioritize high quality manuscripts in terms of their novelty, applicability and impact of findings, as well as relevance to our diverse and broad readership, in addition to the manuscript's scientific merit. Together with AMIA leaders, we will seek models to accommodate meritorious submissions that currently cannot fit into the journal's issues due to the overwhelming increase in the number of articles that have been submitted to journal lately, as well as to current constraints on number of pages we can publish per year. In other words, JAMIA itself will need to innovate in order to keep up with changing times.
I believe that the role of a scientific journal such as JAMIA is to promote change, document it, and disseminate it to the broadest possible audience. I stand in the shoulders of those who made JAMIA the great journal it is today, and I am honored to be leading it together with an outstanding editorial team during a most exciting time for our field.