Charting a path for our members

Charting a path for our members

Health informatics is becoming more important to the delivery of health and health care and more diverse in the kinds of settings and expertise that health informatics professionals will need to be successful. Precision medicine initiatives will need to leverage translational informatics and data sciences to connect genomic and data insights with actionable clinical information. Consumer-focused health devices and electronic health records raise issues of interoperability, usability, and workflow integration that are essential to applied informatics professionals. In the health policy realm, changing models of reimbursement not only will require population health and data sciences expertise, but also will require knowing the right questions to ask and how to integrate the answers into health care. It is the informatics professionals, represented by AMIA’s 5,300-plus members, who possess the leadership and expertise to contribute across these domains and to make a real difference in how information is collected, analyzed, and used to improve the health of our society.

But other organizations are seeing the importance of health informatics and the potential for financial and marketing opportunities. Programs are springing up that profess to teach health informatics, but are using faculty who lack informatics training and are teaching to a curriculum that does not include core informatics concepts. Associations are offering certifications in “health informatics” that do not use the core informatics competencies and marketing those certifications to an unsuspecting public.

These incursions from other organizations make AMIA’s longtime efforts to support, educate, train, and grow the health informatics field even more urgent. It means that:

• Employers need to be able to identify individuals who have real informatics skills and competencies from those who do not.

• Students need a mechanism to separate programs that teach real informatics grounded in the well-established skills and competencies from programs that are health informatics in name only.

• AMIA needs to embrace the growth of the field and the diversity of programs and expertise of health informatics professionals by developing more than one way to recognize educational and professional excellence.

Recognizing Professional Excellence

In 2009, AMIA started the process of recognizing professional excellence in developing the clinical informatics board subspecialty with the publication of seminal papers in JAMIA and with plans to create an equivalent certification to recognize individuals who are not eligible to sit for the clinical informatics boards.¹ This year, we will make significant investments in developing the Advanced Health Informatics Certification (AHIC), which will allow clinically focused health informatics professionals who are not eligible to sit for the clinical informatics board subspecialty to achieve a complementary level of professional recognition. While the eligibility criteria are different between the CI board and AHIC,² much of the core content overlaps. It will be the informatics professionals within AMIA who will be the stewards of the core content that define the field.

While recognizing individuals who achieve the highest level of recognition is important, the diversity of careers in health informatics and individuals suggests that a single recognition is insufficient. Some individuals might graduate with only a master’s or bachelor’s degree in informatics and not be eligible for AHIC. They might acquire experience and skills in the workforce and wish to differentiate themselves through other kinds of certification and recognition. Similar to other fields such as engineering, there might be a need for a professional certification that recognizes individuals who have demonstrated excellence in their field at a master’s (or bachelor’s) level. To meet this challenge, AMIA will need to bring together the educators who produce these graduates with the industries and employers who want to identify highly skilled and highly qualified informatics professionals.

Assuring Educational Excellence

The increasing visibility of health informatics and the importance of informatics in the changing health care landscape has led to many educational programs putting the label “informatics” on programs that are informatics in name only. Health information management, computer science, and other fields are using the term “health informatics” within their programs, leaving some students disappointed when they realize the skills they are learning are not reflective of the field. In 2014, AMIA joined the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education and began to accredit master’s programs in informatics. This serves 2 important purposes: First, it allows students to identify those programs that meet the high competency standards of the informatics community and recognizes programs that are of high quality in the education they provide. Second, it creates a common denominator for individuals seeking to take a certifying examination. Students who graduate from an accredited program can be assured that they will have a robust knowledge base that will help them prepare for the exam.

While we have developed accreditation standards for master’s programs, we are now seeing bachelor’s programs beginning to emerge. As with the master’s programs, it will also be important for these programs to be held to a high standard of excellence and for students to be able look to these programs and be assured that they will get an informatics education, not one that is informatics in name only. A clear pathway for learners who are interested in pursuing informatics education programs in their formative years depends on leadership from educators and employers committed to the pipeline.

Celebrating AMIA Members

Finally, as we see diversity in professional recognition and accreditation standards, we need to reflect that within our own organization. A key pillar of our strategic plan is to recognize our members at all stages of their career. While the American College of Medical Informatics remains the highest professional recognition in our field, there could be other ways to recognize members who achieve success by implementing and applying their knowledge in applied areas. Similar to a portfolio of certification and accreditation standards, we might need additional ways to recognize the professional achievements and contributions that our members have made to AMIA.

Developing certification and accreditation standards reflects the professionalization of informatics. It assures the integrity of the core content, competencies, and educational offerings of our profession. As informatics grows beyond a field in which “everyone knows everyone,” it is increasingly important to help young professionals find the right career path for them, and for employers to be assured that someone newly trained in informatics has the desired skills. Certification and accreditation standards assure that informatics professionals remains a highly valued part of health and health care.