Biomedical and Health Informatics in Translational Medicine

OBJECTIVES: To discuss translational medicine advances challenging biomedical and health informatics. METHODS: Reviewing material presented at the Heidelberg 35th Anniversary Workshop, summarizing results from the 1st AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics and discussing the opportunities, difficulties, and ethical dilemmas confronting researchers, practitioners, and healthcare managers in transitional bioinformatics. RESULTS: The first results in translational medicine are appearing in the biomedical literature. All rely on bioinformatics methods for analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Translational medicine introduces new problems of interpretation and application to healthcare. Applying results to complex human-machine systems raises ethical issues, which are augmented in healthcare informatics. Bridging biological, medical, and informatics knowledge requires new epistemological approaches.