I think it's coming. Certainly in my research we have quite an interdisciplinary team. We have anyone from computing and electrical engineers, computer scientists, health informaticians, nurses, pediatricians, obstetricians, neonatologists. When you bring everyone together, that is really when you bring the innovation through, because everyone's working towards that common goal of trying to improve the care at the bedside.
I think there's more that we need to do. One of the challenges we have in working in that interdisciplinary space is that we all speak a different language. As a computer scientist, I needed to learn a lot about the conditions in the medical domains I'm trying to support and the types of care outcomes they're trying to work to. It's something I've needed to do and have worked towards over a number of years, so when I give presentations people assume now that I'm a neonatologist, when I'm not. I just have listened; I've gone on rounds and I've learned.
We need a lot more of that. We need fundamental mechanisms in our educational system, which is why I made the point before about the fact that clinical informatics really needs to be a subspecialty. It needs to be formally recognized across the nation in many different disciplines in health care.