A reply to Shachak

Dear JAMIA editors and readers:

We appreciate Shachak’s letter regarding our article entitled “A Call for Social Informatics.”¹ In it, he argues that social informatics is a poor term to describe a field dedicated to the application of information technologies to capture and apply social data in conjunction with health data in order to advance health.² We continue to believe that it is a useful term, however, and value this opportunity to share our reasoning.

In selecting the term social informatics, we were aware of the existence of a field of social informatics, which focuses on the study of the interaction of various aspects of information and communication technologies with institutional and cultural contexts.³ However, this use of the term social informatics is rarely found in the biomedical informatics literature. In a PubMed search for the term social informatics, we identified 67 publications (not including our article) with the term. We were able to retrieve 64 of these articles; only 6 used the term in the article itself. In the remaining 58, the term appeared as part of the author affiliation or institutional description (eg, from a School or Department of Social Informatics). We believe that this offers strong evidence that the term is not in widespread use in the biomedical informatics literature.

In writing our article, we considered other terms for this new field, such as clinical social informatics and social determinants of health informatics. However, the bulkiness and awkwardness of these options were problematic in comparison with the more succinct term of social informatics.

We understand Shachak’s concern about the potential for confusion. However, we are reassured by examples of the same term used for related but distinct perspectives and domains of work without causing confusion. For example, medical sociology, an established subfield of sociology, encompasses 2 different bodies of work that have been labeled sociology of medicine, vs sociology in medicine.⁴ The former situates the researcher outside of medicine, looking in and applying sociological theory to understand organizational aspects of healthcare institutions and the practice of medicine. The latter situates the researcher within medicine, looking outward and collaborating with the clinician to understand factors affecting disease etiology and treatment. The term medical sociology covers both of these areas.

Similarly, we believe that the term social informatics as a subfield of health informatics could encompass both research that broadly explores the use of information and communications technologies in different institutional and cultural contexts and the more specific case of strategies to capture and apply social data in concert with health data to improve health. This approach would give explicit consideration to the individual, institutional, and cultural contexts surrounding integration efforts. We look forward to working with Shachak and others to advance the important research in this emerging domain.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Lisa and John Pritzker Family Foundation. MSP also receives support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality under Award Number K12HS026383, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences under Award Number KL2TR001870.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

All authors contributed to the conception, design, drafting, editing, and revising the manuscript. All authors approved the final version for submission and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

DATA AVAILABILITY

No new data were generated or analyzed in support of this research.