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The Primary Care Informatics Working Group (PCIWG) of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has identified the absence of a national strategy for primary care informatics. Under PCIWG leadership, major national and international societies have come together to create the National Alliance for Primary Care Informatics (NAPCI), to promote a connection between the informatics community and the organisations that support primary care. The PCIWG clinical practice subcommittee has recognised the necessity of a global needs assessment, and proposed work in point-of-care technology, clinical vocabularies, and ambulatory electronic medical record development. Educational needs include a consensus statement on informatics competencies, recommendations for curriculum and teaching methods, and methodologies to evaluate their effectiveness. The research subcommittee seeks to define a primary care informatics research agenda, and to support and disseminate informatics research throughout the primary care community. The AMIA board of directors has enthusiastically endorsed the conceptual basis for this White Paper.

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This article examines the ideas that underpinned American psychological war (psywar) in the Pacific. While we cannot precisely measure its effects, we can trace its intellectual history with more confidence. US psywar was a combination of scientific method and myth-making. Assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army tended to be careful, discriminating, and increasingly sophisticated, if not uniformly accurate. At the level of the battle front, practitioners of the ‘mind war’ strove to overcome stereotypes and refine and complexify their view of the enemy.The further they moved from the battlefield towards assessments of Japanese military leadership, society, and high politics, the more they became myth-makers, projecting onto Japan a powerful set of preconceived ideas. These included notions of the superstitious and malleable Japanese mind, the suicidal military elite, and the innocent symbol emperor. In their analysis two models of culture evolved. Their approach to the IJA mostly presented culture as dynamic, layered, and conflicted, whereas their view of Japanese society was monolithic, bounded, and timeless. This contradictory pattern can be explained by different levels of exposure to the subject, the practice of filling ‘knowledge gaps’ with preconceptions, and by American policymaking interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]