Today’s medical students know they’ll need to integrate technology into their practices beyond simply using electronic health records (EHR)—but their interest in pursuing training to learn more about health care data and the number of opportunities to do so don’t match up, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The study looked at interest in training for clinical informatics—the study of health information and data to improve patient care—which was declared a new medical subspecialty and certified 456 physicians in 2013.
Two of the schools that are part of the AMA’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education consortium, the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) School of Medicine, participated in the study. Those schools were joined by the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and the University of Arkansas for Medical Science.
Out of 557 medical student respondents from these schools, nearly one-third expressed an interest in a clinical informatics-related career, but was unaware of appropriate training and mentoring opportunities. The student interest is promising, but the lack of education is a problem, the study said.
Last year, OHSU identified competencies medical students should have surrounding informatics, including finding and applying information to patient care, effectively using an EHR, using information to improve patient safety and engaging patients to improve their health through a patient portal.
However, lack of curricular time and trained informatics specialists make it difficult to deliver adequate informatics education at the undergraduate medical level, the study said. The authors suggested ways to overcome these challenges:
- Elective courses in informatics
- Professional society incentives
- Online or in-person forums to bring interest parties together
- Informal partnerships between medical students and informatics experts
Part of OHSU’s curriculum transformation under the AMA initiative includes integrating more clinical informatics. Besides establishing the competencies medical students should have in the subject, leaders at the school are working to define the optimal relationship between the 21st century physician and the data they and others generate about their patients and their practice.
