Suchergebnisse

The 2001 U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) Biomedical Informatics Roadmap Meeting was devoted to developing a strategic plan in four focus areas: Hospital and Clinical Informatics, E-Health, Combat Health Informatics, and Bioinformatics and Biomedical Computation. The driving force of this Roadmap Meeting was the recent accelerated pace of change in biomedical informatics in which emerging technologies have the potential to affect significantly the Army research portfolio and investment strategy in these focus areas. The meeting was structured so that the first two days were devoted to presentations from experts in the field, including representatives from the three services, other government agencies, academia, and the private sector, and the morning of the last day was devoted to capturing specific biomedical informatics research needs in the four focus areas. This white paper summarizes the key findings and recommendations and should be a powerful tool for the crafting of future requests for proposals to help align USAMRMC new strategic research investments with new developments and emerging technologies.

Many of the problems of military research and development are not special, either because they are common to other comparable research and development programs or because they are common to other parts of the military pro grams. The military programs are concerned with research, but the main emphasis is on development and on the entire chain of activities necessary to improve the capabilities of the operational forces. The magnitude and complexity of the pro grams are tremendous; these factors, particularly the complex nature and interrelations of their objectives, are at the root of most of the problems of military research and development. The basic organizational problem is to find a way to centralize responsibility for the crucial decisions involving selections among alternative military capabilities and technical ap proaches, while at the same time decentralizing detailed man agement to allow a maximum of freedom and flexibility in the actual conduct of research and development work. The prob lems of military research and development culminate in the budget process. Making the proper allocation to military re search and development within the over-all limitations and dis tributing this amount to individual research and development projects are the most difficult problems of our time.