A Great Time to be an Academic Informatician

My recent posting describing my updated study of the health IT workforce shows that this is a great time to work in operational health IT and informatics settings. Many of us, however, work as faculty or in other professional roles in academic health science centers, a smaller but critically important part of the informatics workforce. What are the prospects for those in academic informatics?

I would argue they are excellent. There are great opportunities now both for those who follow the traditional academic researcher/educator pathway as well as for those who focus their involvement in the more operational activities in academic health science centers.

For those following the more conventional faculty pathway, the grant funding situation is currently pretty good. While the main supporter of basic informatics research, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), has a small research budget, it has grown 14% with the increased federal funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the last couple years. Fortunately, informatics researchers have more options. Despite attempts in some political quarters to de-fund the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ), the agency continues to pursue and fund its research objectives, a decent portion of which involves informatics innovation. Likewise, the other institutes of the NIH, including those that are disease-oriented, offer opportunities for research that includes informatics activities. This includes not only the big initiatives, such as the AllOfUs project, but day-to-day work with others, such as the National Sleep Research Resource. There are also research funding opportunities from foundations, industry, and others.

Of course, one fortunate aspect of being academic informatics faculty is that activities are not limited to those focusing mainly on research. There are other opportunities in teaching (including beyond those studying informatics, such as healthcare professional students) and operational work (supporting and innovating in all of the missions of academic medical centers, which include clinical care, research, and education). Academic informaticians are often involved implementation of operational systems, especially those supporting healthcare delivery and research. Given the growth of informatics and data science, there are likely to be teaching opportunities for those of us who enjoy teaching our area of expertise to clinicians and others who work in healthcare.

For all of these reasons, I am pretty bullish on careers in academic informatics. While no career pathway in any field is a guarantee of success these days, there are plenty of opportunities for those seeking academic careers in informatics.