Additional OHSU Contributions to Clinical Informatics Subspecialty Training

In addition to having our own clinical informatics fellowship, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) will be contributing to training in the subspecialty in other ways. One of main activities by which we will be contributing will be through providing courses in our biomedical informatics distance learning program to other programs. This is actually something we have been doing for a number of other university programs for several years, and now we are excited to do it for clinical informatics fellowship programs.

Our approach will be straightforward, as fellows in other programs will enroll as OHSU distance learning students. In discussion with colleagues directing the programs that will take part, the emerging preference for them appears to be our Graduate Certificate Program, which requires eight academic-quarter three-credit courses. Trainees will take one or two courses at a time. We also hope to enroll students from participating programs as a cohort and provide interactive opportunities for fellows in our program and those from other institutions who take our courses.

We anticipate fellows will be interested in a variety of our courses that are offered online, though have designated five courses as core to their studies, indicated by asterisks below:
BMI 510 - Introduction to Biomedical and Health Informatics*
BMI 512 - Clinical Information Systems*
BMI 513 - Electronic Health Record Laboratory
BMI 514 - Information Retrieval
BMI 515 - Ethical, Legal and Social issues in Biomedical Informatics
BMI 516 - Standards and Interoperability in Healthcare
BMI 517 - Organizational Behavior and Management*
BMI 518 - Project Management*
BMI 519 - Business of Healthcare Informatics*
BMI 520 - Consumer Health Informatics
BMI 521 - Public Health Informatics
BMI 523 - Clinical Research Informatics
BMI 537 - Healthcare Quality
BMI 544 - Databases
BMI 548 - Human-Computer Interaction
BMI 549 - Health Information Privacy and Security
BMI 560 - Design & Evaluation in Health Informatics

In order to help program directors determine the best course of study for their fellows, we have mapped all of our courses to American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM) core content in clinical informatics. For each course, the linked document shows whether the core content item is covered by lecture (L), article (A), reading (R), book (B), and/or exercise (E). The first five columns, highlighted in yellow, represent the content of the core courses as defined above. (We offer even more courses than this, some of which are only offered on-campus, but the entire list can be found in our course catalog.)

One question I commonly get from Program Directors concerns our tuition costs. Our tuition schedule for the 2014-2015 academic year is shown in the image below. The full cost for eight three-credit courses in the Graduate Certificate program is about $19,000. We hope to add value to that by facilitating interaction among fellows in our program and others.

I look forward to clinical informatics fellowship programs launching and OHSU playing a role in a number of them. Just as our distance learning program has led to a virtual community forming among our entire student population, I hope that a similar group will emerge among clinical informatics fellows.