Beyond information retrieval and electronic health record use: competencies in clinical informatics for medical education

TLDR

Physicians increasingly interact with diverse information systems, yet medical curricula have mainly focused on information retrieval and EHR use, overlooking emerging domains such as clinical decision support, quality improvement, personal health records, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. The authors outline a faculty‑driven process at Oregon Health & Science University to define clinical informatics competencies and invite debate and evaluation of this curriculum transformation. They convened six faculty from varied perspectives to develop broad competencies, specific learning objectives, milestones, an implementation schedule, and mapping to general competency domains.

Abstract

Physicians in the 21st century will increasingly interact in diverse ways with information systems, requiring competence in many aspects of clinical informatics. In recent years, many medical school curricula have added content in information retrieval (search) and basic use of the electronic health record. However, this omits the growing number of other ways that physicians are interacting with information that includes activities such as clinical decision support, quality measurement and improvement, personal health records, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. We describe a process whereby six faculty members representing different perspectives came together to define competencies in clinical informatics for a curriculum transformation process occurring at Oregon Health & Science University. From the broad competencies, we also developed specific learning objectives and milestones, an implementation schedule, and mapping to general competency domains. We present our work to encourage debate and refinement as well as facilitate evaluation in this area.