Health IT vendors and the academic community: The 2014 ACMI debate

The American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) periodically hosts a debate at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) fall symposium on a timely topic in biomedical informatics. In 2014 a panel of ACMI fellows debated the following proposition: “The lack of interaction and collaboration between health IT vendors and academic clinical informatics units is stifling innovation and will continue to have a detrimental effect on the evolution of commercial products.” Debaters disagreed on the level of interaction and collaboration between the health IT sector and academia and disagreed on whether and by whom innovation was actually taking place. While collaboration between industry and academia was seen as desirable by all of the debaters, there was an acknowledgment that these groups have notably different roles and responsibilities. There was consensus that a path forward should be found, and that AMIA itself has an important role to play in effecting this.