Translational Research for Public Health Informatics

Translational research in public health informatics is the translation of advancements made at the intersections of information technology, mathematics, and epidemiology into tools and applications to support public health practice. This form of research is performed in a series of phases known as the Translational Research Continuum. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Technical Working Group developed a continuum with five phases that has been modified to support public health informatics.

The continuum consists of six phases. The first phase is known as basic scientific discovery which can occur in several different fields, but the most common are computer science, epidemiology or biostatistics, The second phase is a filtering process that places requirements on informatics projects to be relevant to public health technology needs rather than technology for technology sake. The third phase consists of partnering agencies who will eventually be adopters and making sure the informatics fits within their business processes. The fourth phase is application development and evaluation. The next phase is disseminating the knowledge gained to the community through presentations, publications, and open sourcing the technology. The final phase is adoption into routine practice by the public health community.

The NCI continuum stops at adoption, but most successful informatics projects continue to add functionality and adopters as the value of the tool or application is realized. As new discoveries and requirements evolve, the cycle can start over again at any of the phases.

The objective of this presentation will be to describe the public health informatics translational research continuum and give examples of how many successful projects have followed this method for getting the results of their research into practice.