The Next Chapter in Continuing Education for Informatics

This week, the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) launched a new annual continuing education (CE) activity in clinical informatics. With the first offering of the OHSU Annual Update in Clinical Informatics, a selection of important topics will be covered to provide an update for all clinical informatics professionals. For physicians, the course will provide continuing medical education (CME) credit. For physicians certified in the clinical informatics subspecialty, the course will provide MOC-II/LLSA credits.

The field of clinical informatics (and closely related health informatics) is a growing profession that plays an important role in healthcare and other health-related areas [1]. Informatics professionals insure that data and information are used most effectively to improve healthcare, public health, individual health, and research. The certification initially of physicians [2] and soon others in the field [3] requires that all informatics professionals maintain and expand their knowledge and skills.

This course builds off the extensive informatics education offerings of DMICE, from our biomedical informatics graduate program that has awarded 831 degrees and certificates over more than 20 years to our other innovative activities such as the AMIA 10×10 (“ten by ten”) program, the development of online learning in informatics, and launching one of the first clinical informatics subspecialty fellowships for physicians [4].

The learning activity consists of 7 modules that are estimated to take a total of 8 hours to complete. The activity is completely online, and consists of lectures and self-assessment quizzes. The topics for the 2019 annual update were selected by DMICE faculty. Topics for future annual updates will be chosen with input from those who completed previous annual update courses.

After taking this learning activity, clinical informatics professionals will be able to (1) be aware of current advances in clinical informatics. (2) apply these advances to their professional practice, and (3) meet required competencies that are related to the domain of clinical informatics in the practice of their profession.

The activity will consist of a number of talks given by DMICE faculty that will focus on recent developments in the field. The activity will be hosted on OHSU’s Sakai learning management system as enduring learning material. Once learners enroll in the activity, they will have access to Sakai and be able to complete the activity and evaluations at their own pace. Each talk will be accompanied by a post-test (multiple choice), and learners will also need to complete a course evaluation at the end of their learning. The 2019 course activities must be completed by June 30, 2020.

The topics covered in this year’s offering of the course include:

• Operational Clinical Informatics
• Organizational Behavior
• Data Science and Machine Learning
• Clinical Research Informatics
• Informatics Education
• SMART on FHIR
• Nursing Informatics

Details of this online CE experience are available at: https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/medical-informatics-and-clinical-epidemiology/ohsu-annual-update-clinical

This is not the only continuing education activity in clinical informatics that will be offered by OHSU. In the coming year, we will also offer for CME and ABPM MOC-II credit our monthly clinical informatics journal clubs and grand rounds.

References

1. Fridsma, D. (2019). Strengthening our profession by defining clinical and health informatics practice. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Epub ahead of print.
2. Detmer, D., & Shortliffe, E. (2014). Clinical informatics: prospects for a new medical subspecialty. Journal of the American Medical Association, 311, 2067-2068.
3. Gadd, C., Williamson, J., Steen, E., & Fridsma, D. (2016). Creating advanced health informatics certification. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 23, 848-850.
4. Longhurst, C., Pageler, N., Palma, J., Finnell, J., Levy, B., Yackel, T., . . . Hersh, W. (2016). Early experiences of accredited clinical informatics fellowships. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 23, 829-834.

Kudos for the Informatics Professor - Winter/Spring 2019 Update

I have had a busy but productive early 2019, with invited talks, publications, and other happenings.

I gave a few invited talks:

• Information Retrieval from Electronic Health Records for Patient Cohort Discovery, Center for Genome Research & Biocomputing, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, February 25, 2019
• Information Retrieval from Electronic Health Records for Patient Cohort Discovery, MU Informatics Institute, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, March 7, 2019
• The Clinical Impact of Clinical Informatics, Inspiring Experts Clifford G. Pilz Memorial Lecture, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, April 16, 2019

The latter was a real honor, as it took place at my medical school alma mater, University of Illinois Chicago, and it was fun to see both informatics colleagues as well as some former classmates who attended the lecture.

I also had the opportunity to attend the inaugural induction of Fellows of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) at the AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference in Atlanta, GA on May 1, 2019. The initial group of FAMIA included 15 alumni and faculty of the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, comprising over 11% of the inaugural fellows. Below is a picture of OHSU alumni and myself who attended the induction ceremony.

I was also interviewed for an article in Medscape Internal Medicine about the new clinical informatics subspecialty.

I continue to serve on several scientific advisory boards:

• Pan African Bioinformatics Network for H3Africa (H3ABionet), which provides bioinformatics support for the Human Heredity and Health in Africa Project (H3Africa). I will be attending my second meeting of the board in Cape Town, South Africa in July.
• RCMI Multidisciplinary And Translational Research Infrastructure EXpansion (RMATRIX), a translational research center of the John A. Burns School of Medicine of the University of Hawaii. The grant funding of this is ending, so this board will also be ending.
• ECRI Guidelines Trust (EGT) Technical Advisory Panel (TAP), a publicly available web-based repository of objective, evidence-based clinical practice guideline content that succeeds the Agency for Healthcare Quality & Research (AHRQ) National Guidelines Clearinghouse. (I also served on the Technical Expert Panel of National Practice Guidelines Clearinghouse when it was developed and launched by AHRQ from 1998-2002.)

I am also co-author on a couple papers that were published:

• Wang Y, Wen A, Liu S, Hersh W, Bedrick S, Liu H, Test collections for electronic health record-based clinical information retrieval, JAMIA Open, 2019, Epub ahead of print.
• Toll ET, Alkureshi MA, Lee WW, Babbott SF, Bain PA, Beasley JA, Frankel RM, Loveys AA, Wald HS, Woods SS, Hersh WR, Protecting healing relationships in the age of electronic health records: report from an international conference, JAMIA Open, 2019, Epub ahead of print.

I also had the pleasure, as I do every June, of seeing a new group of graduates from the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. This year saw 45 new alumni of the program honored. With these new graduates, the program has now awarded a total of 831 degrees and certificates dating back 22 years to the first graduates in 1998 (who started when the program launched in 1996). As some have completed more than one program degree or certificate (e.g., the Graduate Certificate and Master’s or the Master’s and PhD; one person has done all three!), the program has a total of 746 alumni.

Finally, AMIA has produced and posted videos for several of the courses in the 10x10 program. A video of myself describing the OHSU course has been posted on the main page for the program on the AMIA Web site.