ArticleBMJ health & care informatics2026
Beyond the digital health tsunami: reaffirming biomedical and health informatics as the scientific foundation of digital healthcare transformation.
Article in BMJ health & care informatics, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Clarifying the relationship between biomedical and health informatics and digital health: expert perspectives.BMJ health & care informatics · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Digital health (DH) has emerged as the dominant terminology for technology-enabled healthcare, reshaping institutional discourse, educational programmes and policy agendas. DH is often portrayed as a novel discipline that could supersede Biomedical and Health Informatics (BMHI), creating conceptual ambiguity and the risk of weakening scientific rigour in the design, evaluation and governance of digital interventions. This paper clarifies BMHI's disciplinary identity, characterises DH as a practice-oriented and implementation-oriented domain, and establishes the epistemic relationship between the two in order to inform academic strategy, curricula and professional identity. A comparative conceptual analysis examined scope, theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, educational frameworks, professional structures and stakeholder ecosystems in both domains, informed by recent debates on degree programmes and workforce training. We found that BMHI is a mature scientific discipline with explicit theoretical foundations encompassing data representation, knowledge modelling, clinical reasoning, decision support, interoperability, sociotechnical analysis, evaluation science, safety, ethics and governance. DH, by contrast, represents an implementation-oriented translational domain that operationalises BMHI through products, services and organisational transformation (eg, telehealth, mobile applications, artificial intelligence-enabled clinical services). While DH has amplified visibility and accelerated adoption, it lacks autonomous theoretical foundations and depends on BMHI for scientific validity, safety and sustainability. Three evolutionary scenarios are examined: DH absorbing BMHI (epistemically incoherent), convergence as parallel disciplines (conceptually flawed), and reintegration of DH within BMHI as its applied layer (scientifically coherent and strategically sustainable) but requiring disciplinary communication, curricular alignment and institutional leadership explicitly positioning DH as a translational layer of BMHI.
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.