Mapping the AMIA Clinical Informatics Core Content into the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Curriculum

One of the most exciting developments in the clinical informatics field in recent years has been its designation as a new medical subspecialty. Even if one is not a physician, the professional recognition of the work of clinical informatics is important. Hopefully we will see others who work professionally in informatics achieve comparable professional recognition. Indeed, AMIA has established an Advanced Interprofessional Informatics Certification Task Force to explore the best approaches for certification of non-physician informaticians.

Another valuable outcome of the clinical informatics certification process was the development of the core content for the clinical informatics subspecialty (Gardner, R., Overhage, J., et al. (2009). Core content for the subspecialty of clinical informatics. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16: 153-157. http://jamia.bmj.com/content/16/2/153.full.pdf+html.). This content is by no means limited to physicians and should serve as the basis for the curricular content for all clinical informatics programs.

We recently undertook an analysis of the curricular content in our Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) to see how our existing courses mapped into the AMIA core content. We were pleased to discover that just about everything in it is covered by one or more courses in our master's degree program. We are planning to undertake a more detailed analysis in the future to make sure our curricular materials are covered adequately and reflect the most state-of-the-art content. But in the meantime, I am pleased to report that we will be ready to provide education for certification in the field when such programs are ready to be launched. The results of this analysis can be viewed in this PDF file.