Fellows will participate in the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Clinical Informatics certificate program throughout both fellowship years. This goal of this program is to provide a technology foundation background that is essential to developing a clinical informatics fund of knowledge. This is accomplished by providing fellows with a theoretical and practical understanding of the role of information in health care; a sound basis for implementing, developing, maintaining, and managing information resources and systems in health care; and skills in the management of health information, technology, and decision making. The curriculum consists of eight three-credit courses, for a total of 24 credit hours. Students are required to complete the following three courses (9 credit hours): Introduction to Biomedical Informatics, Clinical Information Systems, and Organizational Behavior and Management. Five elective courses (15 credit hours) complete the curriculum.
The Clinical Informatics fellow and his or her faculty mentor will collaboratively develop a 2-year schedule that contains block time for mandatory and elective rotations. The first-year fellow will begin with a multi-block inpatient rotation that is designed to familiarize the fellow with the health system, the clinical IT systems, and the manner in which IT projects are executed.
Among the topic areas in which the Fellows will be expected to gain expertise include the following:
- EMR implementation and optimization
- History and Current State of Informatics
- Ethics, Privacy, Legal, and Regulatory Issues in Informatics
- The Health System
- Clinical Decision-Making
- Applied Decision-Support
- Knowledge Acquisition, Storage, and Appropriate Use
- Use of data systems, data mining, and database architecture
- Enterprise Information Management Strategies
- Healthcare Data Reuse: Challenges and Strategies
- Evidence-Based Medicine
- Information Retrieval
- Federal Informatics Initiatives including Meaningful Use
- Clinical Workflow Analysis
- Healthcare Quality Improvement
- Computer Programming and Methods of Software Development
- Systems, Database, and Network Architecture
- Information Security and Privacy
- Human Computer Interaction
- Information Systems in Practice
- HIT Architectures and Interfaces
- Standards for Representing Clinical Data
- Messaging and Interoperability, including ONC initiatives
- Selection and Implementation of Clinical Systems
- Operation, Support, and Maintenance of Clinical Systems
- Evaluation of Clinical Systems
- Organizational Behavior
- Building Effective Healthcare IT Teams
- Communication Strategies
- Project Management
- Continuous quality improvement
- Lean Principles and workflow planning
- Strategic Planning
- Healthcare IT Budgeting and Resource Allocation
- Change Management
- IT Vendor Management
- IT Finance