The time taken to translate biomedical research into clinical practise remains too long. The volume of research in biomedical science is ever increasing. We may soon reach a point where no individual can hope to process all the information available into effective healthcare strategies.
By 2008, there were 18 million research papers in biomedical
science literature, and it is expected that the amount of papers published this
year will exceed 1 million1.
This vast body of information must be harnessed in order to
maximise patient wellbeing. In 2008, the average time for translation of
research into clinical practice was 17 years1. This may be seen as a
reflection of the difficulty in integrating biomedical research – in finding
room for new data – and having a flexible knowledge framework that is most
suited for knowledge absorption.
However, as this information transfer speeds up, the
challenges facing healthcare professionals also increase. The days when “a
physician might have reasonably expected to know everything in the field of
medicine1” have long passed, and yet specialisation and
sub-specialisation can only buy time. In fact, the increasingly fractured
implementation of healthcare can pose its own problems, as treatment focuses on
more and more isolated targets and less and less on whole patients.
The key to the future transfer of scientific knowledge will
be in managing and integrating information from increasingly varied sources. As
we start to discuss systems for relating and describing the quality of data and
information, and as we build ever more realistic predictive models, this
knowledge transfer will become more efficient. In this future, instead of being
inundated with information, which needs to be analysed, judged, adapted and
implemented, clinicians could be presented with robust,
systematically-generated knowledge already tailored for clinical
implementation.
