The mission of the Rocky Mountain Center for Translational Research in Public Health Informatics (RMC) is to translate public health informatics research to public health practice to benefit the health of individuals and populations at local, regional, and national levels. The Rocky Mountain Center comprises a multi- and interdisciplinary community of collaborating practitioners, health officials, researchers, and scientists affiliated with health departments, academic institutions, health care systems, and other types of organizations. Our community members are committed to knowledge discovery, technology development, tool dissemination, and inter-regional collaboration. The RMC has three over-arching themes. First, we promote organizational partnerships to advance informatics-based transformation of public health practice through initiatives such as clinical health information exchange and public health grid. These partnerships are based on alignment of interests, shared vision/value, common goals, open communication, mutual respect, and trust. Second, we have leveraged these partnerships to establish public health, clinical, and community environments within which to conduct practice-based research. These research projects are motivated by the concerns and priorities of public health practitioners, reflecting the grounding of the RMC in participatory research principles. Third, our work effectively bridges informatics, public health, epidemiology, computer science, cognitive psychology, and clinical medicine. The RMC routinely brings together experts from each of these disciplines, supporting interactions across a variety of collaborative contexts. Our experience is that having a thematic emphasis on translational research that is focused at the interface between disciplines helps generate innovation. Each project affiliated with our Center is associated with both informatics and public health research questions that are of direct relevance to public health. Our experience with this approach has led to building, nurturing, and sustaining partnerships, which we expect to continue with this proposal. Intensifying the central coupling of information science and population science crucially advances public health informatics as a discipline in its own right.
