Currently, neither CIHR nor any of the other two major funding agencies in Canada (SSHRC, NSERC) have a peer-review committee for the discipline of medical/health/nursing informatics. This makes it hard to get academic research and development funded in important areas such as ehealth, electronic health records, cyberinfrastructures for health, consumer health informatics, and mobile health. Assessing applied health informatics, as well as foundational and methodological work in health informatics, which tends to be interdisciplinary involving health sciences, engineering, and social sciences, requires special methodological expertise. Currently, most peer-review committees are disease specific or have other foci (health policy, knowledge translation) and little or no medical informatics expertise within the committee. We urge CIHR to consider adding a health/medical/nursing informatics committee to its current suite of peer-review committees, and to work with the academic medical informatics community and related disciplines to ensure fair assessment of health informatics related projects. Ideally, we also suggest to create an joint CIHR/NSERC/SSHRC Institute for Health Informatics, which provides leadership for linking and supporting researchers in this emerging and critically important field.

About the petition organizer

Gunther Eysenbach MD MPH FACMI, is a professor in Toronto and member of the CIHR Knowledge Translation peer-review committee, but recognized that medical informatics research in Canada is seriously underfunded due to the fact that medical informatics proposals have to compete with basic and clinical research in the same peer-review committees. Federal research grants 2009-2011 for health informatics research amounted to a measly $1 Mio dollar per year, with less than 10 proposals per year funded from 2009-2011 - an outrage, taking into account the multi-billion dollar investments in this field (Canada Infoway spends roughly 200.000.000 million $ per year on electronic health records).

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