News from NIH: column no. 1

Excerpt

In this first issue of this journal, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is pleased to highlight three areas of emphasis that are directly relevant to information technology and evidence implementation. First, the incorporation of mobile technologies, or mHealth, into health care delivery offers exciting possibilities for prevention and management of disease. Second, behavioral and social scientists are harnessing the power of systems science methodologies to explore complex and nonlinear phenomena, synthesize knowledge across disciplines and levels of analysis to gain a better understanding of the big picture, and conduct virtual experiments that are inefficient or impossible to conduct in the real world. Finally, there is a clear imperative for the results from efficacy trials to have greater reach, adoption, to sustainability. NIH has an ever growing role in supporting research that improves translation of research into real-world communities and settings. Some examples of this research emphasis are trans-NIH funding announcements and a yearly conference that highlights the advances and issues in dissemination and implementation science. …