Tuesday, July 16, 2019

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.

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