Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Advice for Physicians in Training Seeking a Clinical Informatics Fellowship

Lately I have received requests for advice from physicians in training asking what they can do to make themselves more competitive for clinical informatics fellowship positions. In some sense these are similar to the emails I receive from established physicians asking about eligibility for the clinical informatics subspecialty here and now. To provide answers to the established physicians most efficiently, I prepared a blog post that I send them to as a reply to get them started in thinking about their eligibility. I am now doing likely in having a generic reply to physicians in training, and it is actually similar to another posting of mine from last year that provided advice to any young person seeking a career in informatics.

Let me then focus specifically on the physician in training who is considering pursuing formal training in clinical informatics, since I have increasingly been receiving emails with this question. My advice is really not much different from what anyone might advise a physician seeking training in any specialty or subspecialty. It is, however, important for potential trainees to remember that starting in 2018, fellowships accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) will be the only pathway to achieve board certification in the new subspecialty.

As for advice, first and foremost, someone seeking formal training in clinical informatics should understand the field and its role in healthcare.  He or she should understand how informatics differs from information technology (IT), computer science, and related areas. The potential informatician should also be aware of the kinds of work that informatics professionals perform and the types of jobs into which they are hired.

A second critical piece of advice is to get involved in some informatics activity in their current medical school or residency program. It need not be a high-profile research project that gets published, but any activity that gives him or her an opportunity to perform and to be able to describe the application of informatics in a healthcare setting that provided value to someone, whether a physician, other healthcare professional, researcher, patient, or even a health system. While it would be ideal for the activity to be a medical school or residency rotation, it could also be volunteer activity. Whatever is done, he or she should be able to describe the work, who benefitted from it, and what principles of informatics it applied.

Another recommendation I can give is to become involved in some sort of professional organization or activity. While participating in a national organization such as the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) may be impractical, he or she can try to become involved in a local or regional organization. In Oregon, for example, we have an active local Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) chapter. There are also national as well as local medical societies and other professional organizations that also carry out informatics activity.

A final bit of advice is to choose a fellowship that aligns with one's career goals. The clinical informatics subspecialty fellowship is focused on training for operational informatics work. Those more interested in a research career, especially if training in a medical specialty is not desired, should consider something like the National Library of Medicine (NLM)-sponsored research fellowships, which Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) offers along with 13 other universities. Our clinical informatics subspecialty fellowship is just one of a family of educational programs in biomedical and health informatics offered by OHSU, and there might be other training options to consider.

In essence, those interested in clinical informatics should understand the field, get involved in it, and connect with professional associations. This advice is really little different from what one might advise someone seeking a career in almost any field. Such activity demonstrates a commitment to the field that will strengthen the application of someone who is seeking a fellowship in clinical informatics.

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