During its third meeting in December 2000, the Clinical Research Roundtable held a symposium entitled Exploring the Map of Clinical Research for the Coming Decade. Speakers were asked to describe the infrastructure needs and clinical research environment of the next 10 years. Topics included the role and impact of genomics, bioinformatics, and clinical information systems on clinical research, as well as the future of evidence-based medicine.

The symposium concluded with a panel of private and public health care purchasers, who discussed their interest and role in clinical research. Repeated themes included

• the need to encourage collaboration among researchers and between academic health centers and for-profit companies;
• the need to develop ways of rewarding collaborative research, particularly in academia;
• the need to develop good data and information management systems that can support huge databases and facilitate mining of clinical information while protecting patient privacy; and
• the need for more consistent standards for these highly valuable, large, automated population-based research resources, which could permit more effective crossdata system record linkages for population based research.