The Ohio State University, in conjunction with Nationwide Children’s Hospital (NCH), has achieved initial accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) for a new Clinical Informatics Fellowship program. This program will train physicians in this relatively new subspecialty of medicine. Through their work, clinical informaticians lead teams that develop, implement, and optimize electronic health records (EHRs) and related health information systems, all with the goal of improving health care and health outcomes for patients and populations.
The fellowship program is led by Peter J. Embi, MD, MS, (program director) and Jeffrey Hoffman, MD (NCH site director). Dr. Embi is an associate professor, Interim Chair and Director of the Division of Clinical and Translational Informatics in the OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics. A practicing rheumatologist, he also serves as Chief Research Information Officer for the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and Associate Dean for Research Informatics in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. Dr. Hoffman is the Chief Medical Information Officer for NCH and also a practicing pediatric emergency medicine physician. Additional key clinical informatics faculty helping to lead the fellowship include Milisa Rizer, MD, MPH, and Courtney Hebert, MD, MS, from the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, and Aarti Chandawarkar, MD, and Kathryn Nuss, MD, from NCH.
The two-year fellowship program will include extensive hands-on training experiences and didactic coursework in the practice of clinical informatics. The program will accept up to two fellows each year, for a total of four slots. “Training professionals in clinical informatics is essential to fully realizing the promise of EHRs and Health IT to improve the practice of health care, the discovery of new treatments, and the health of our patients,” said Dr. Embi, who also serves on the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association. “Physicians who complete our fellowship will have the expertise and skills needed to take on leadership roles in health care and health IT across the nation.”
The American Board of Medical Specialties approved Clinical Informatics as a board-eligible subspecialty in September 2011. Accreditation of fellowship programs began in 2014. Physicians who are board-eligible or certified in any primary specialty of medicine are eligible for this fellowship program. OSU also offers a range of programs for non-physicians who wish to train in biomedical informatics.
Individuals interested in learning more about this program should contact the OSU Department of Biomedical Informatics at BMI.education@osumc.edu.