Key Contributions in Clinical Research Informatics

Objectives: To summarize key contributions to current research in the field of Clinical Research Informatics (CRI) and to select best papers published in 2020. Method: A bibliographic search using a combination of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) descriptors and free-text terms on CRI was performed using PubMed, followed by a double-blind review in order to select a list of candidate best papers to be then peer-reviewed by external reviewers. After peer-review ranking, a consensus meeting between two section editors and the editorial team was organized to finally conclude on the selected four best papers. Results: Among the 877 papers published in 2020 and returned by the search, there were four best papers selected. The first best paper describes a method for mining temporal sequences from clinical documents to infer disease trajectories and enhancing high-throughput phenotyping. The authors of the second best paper demonstrate that the generation of synthetic Electronic Health Record (EHR) data through Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) could be substantially improved by more appropriate training and evaluation criteria. The third best paper offers an efficient advance on methods to detect adverse drug events by computer-assisting expert reviewers with annotated candidate mentions in clinical documents. The large-scale data quality assessment study reported by the fourth best paper has clinical research informatics implications, in terms of the trustworthiness of inferences made from analysing electronic health records. Conclusions: The most significant research efforts in the CRI field are currently focusing on data science with active research in the development and evaluation of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) algorithms based on ever more intensive use of real-world data and especially EHR real or synthetic data. A major lesson that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has already taught the scientific CRI community is that timely international high-quality data-sharing and collaborative data analysis is absolutely vital to inform policy decisions.