About the Program
The clinical informatics fellowship is a two-year program designed to train physicians interested in hands-on and didactic training in clinical informatics principles and tools.
Fellows will have completed training in a primary specialty prior to enrolling into the fellowship and will be board-eligible or certified. They will also be required to have had some previous training or exposure to computer programing and/or code based computational analysis with formal training in computer science, engineering, statistics or mathematics preferred. The fellows will be expected to complete a scholarly project and quality improvement project prior to graduation with the expectation that they will present or publish a minimum of two academic work products.
Educational objectives include:
1. Provide shadowing, educational, and supervised practice experiences that will produce well-balanced physicians who are clinical informatics leaders in not only their specialty but also in their institution as a whole.
2. Training to evaluate, design, and implement a clinical informatics solution to real-world healthcare problems and use evidenced-based informatics and clinical research tools to monitor and measure the impact of their solution.
3. Teaching foundational skills in clinical and health information technology as well as observational or hands-on opportunities to learn about the methods and tools that greatly impact healthcare such as mobile health, reporting, and analytics.
4. Developing educational, leadership, business management, innovation, and change management skills through required presentations, projects, and collaborations.
Rotations
1st Year Rotation: Chief Medical Information Officer Observation
Description:
This is a first-year rotation in which our fellow will work closely with the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO). This rotation will be primarily at the University of Iowa University Hospital or via virtual meetings. The goal of this rotation is to demonstrate fundamental roles and skills required in complex decision making and business processes associated with clinical informatics. This month-long rotation will provide the fellow the opportunity to work with the CMIO to understand high-level healthcare information technology organizational structure and hospital administration structure, observe high-level hospital and health system meetings, understand health system funds flow, develop presentations on technical topics for hospital administration and presentation skills with senior executives.
Rotation Assignment:
A presentation on a complex information systems topic will be assigned to the fellow to present to hospital administration. The topic will be related to an ongoing system issue and will either present a progress report or present a topic for a decision by senior hospital administration.
Goals and Objectives:
Patient Care:
- Understands the approach senior administration utilizes to prioritize resource allocation for patient care.
- Recognizes the complexity of decision making between hospital administration and providers, nurses, and other clinical staff.
Medical Knowledge:
- Understands hospital and provider group administration and organizational structure.
- Develops a pro-forma budget for review by senior healthcare leaders.
- Produces concise and directed presentation materials on technical topics for non-technical decision-makers.
- Creates effective communication pathways to develop alignment between senior leaders.
Leadership and System-based Practice:
- Communicates and presents complex topics to a senior healthcare leadership team.
- Understands how to build alliances within a complex health system structure.
- Demonstrates knowledge of the funds-flow within a complex health system in both the health system and provider practice.
- Articulates the legal governance surrounding funds-flow within and between provider organizations.
2nd Year Rotation: Project Analysis & Data Analytics
Description:
This is a second-year rotation in which our fellow will work closely with the HCIS Reporting and Data Analytics team. This rotation will be primarily at the Health Care Support Services Building (HSSB) or via virtual meetings with collaborators. The goal of this rotation is to build upon the foundational clinical informatics skills and tools the fellow learned during their first year of fellowship. During the first year of fellowship, fellows would have observed several new clinical informatics projects and tools being designed, iteratively improved, and implemented. This month-long rotation will provide the fellow the opportunity to work with the reporting and data analytics team to perform an analysis on one or more of the projects the fellow saw being implemented during their first year of fellowship to evaluate if the clinical informatics tool is effective.
Rotation Assignment:
Choose one clinical informatics project to perform a complete data analytics assessment to evaluate effectiveness of the proposed tool or if the clinical informatics tool should be revised or retired. Findings will be presented to the project team and clinical informatics fellowship leadership at the end of the rotation.
Goals and Objectives:
Patient Care:
- Evaluates, measures, and analyzes a clinical decision support tool and the impact on patient care, clinical documentation, and/or physician efficiency.
- Manages project expectations for end-users and leadership and balances competing priority of project effectiveness.
Medical Knowledge:
- Performs data extraction and data analysis using reporting tools and simple SQL queries.
- Uses appropriate clinical informatics analyses and language when collaborating on the project and presenting findings.
- Evaluates or predicts any unintended consequences from the implementation of this clinical informatics tool.
- Performs literature search to see if any alternative or similar solutions have been proposed in the literature.
Leadership and System-based Practice:
- Effectively communicates and presents analysis and next step of the project to the leadership team.
- Discusses if this clinical informatics tool could be effective or useful in other clinical areas and how it could be incorporated into different workflows.
- If appropriate performs a cost-benefit analysis for continuing to use this clinical informatics tool.
