Program Schedule

Evaluating the development, implementation, and use of health IT systems is a foundational element in the science of biomedical informatics. Throughout much of AMIA’s history, these systems have been both developed and evaluated by academic organizations, with the resulting knowledge shared with the informatics community through the peer-reviewed literature. In the last decade or so, these systems have increasingly been developed by commercial vendors and implemented in either academic or community healthcare settings. The evaluation of commercially developed systems and their implementation is done in a variety of settings including within corporate research and development laboratories, at client sites, and in academic and health-system partnership with industry scientists. All such science offers critical lessons for the field of informatics. Nevertheless, publications from industry scientists are often rejected as biased, even when done in collaboration with external partners and in accordance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) uniform requirements for authorship. In this panel, we will explore the question of whether and under which circumstances industry authorship is appropriate and the essential perspective of the industry scientist. We will discuss the topics of commercial and non-commercial bias, the peer review process, authorship requirements, proprietary software, and the role of AMIA in guiding policy in this area.