Aligning Biomedical Informatics with Clinical and Translational Science

Clinical and translational science (CTS) rests largely on information flowing smoothly at multiple levels, in multiple directions, across multiple locations. Hence, Biomedical Informatics (BI) is seen as a backbone that can help to manage the information flows for the process of translation. However, the two concepts may end up being applied incongruently, if uncoordinated. This paper summarizes the objectives for CTS and BI, and provides a mechanism to harmonize their different objectives and guide the design of BI architectures for CTS.