The interactions between clinical informatics and bioinformatics: a case study

Abstract

For the past decade, Stanford Medical Informatics has combined clinical informatics and bioinformatics research and training in an explicit way. The interest in applying informatics techniques to both clinical problems and problems in basic science can be traced to the Dendral project in the 1960s. Having bioinformatics and clinical informatics in the same academic unit is still somewhat unusual and can lead to clashes of clinical and basic science cultures. Nevertheless, the benefits of this organization have recently become clear, as the landscape of academic medicine in the next decades has begun to emerge. The author provides examples of technology transfer between clinical informatics and bioinformatics that illustrate how they complement each other.

Figure 1

The Stanford Medical Informatics logo stresses the combination of clinical medicine, basic biology, and computer science. Variations are found at http://smi-web.stanford.edu/logos/index.html.