Curriculum and Rotations for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship

Our Curriculum

The two-year fellowship program will include extensive hands-on training experiences and didactic coursework in the practice of clinical informatics.

We provide a practice-based education that leverages teaching hard skills and knowledge sharing by tackling real world problems alongside analysts, physician colleagues from all different departments, nursing informaticists, pharmacy informaticists, and a variety of leaders throughout the health system.

Our two-year curriculum is designed to lay a foundation for learning and success in clinical informatics, leveraging the best that both The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children’s Hospital can offer, while at the same time exposing our fellows to the unique governance, operations, and culture of both institutions.

Rotations

The First year of the fellowship is focused on general informatics principles and learning skills. Second year is specialty informatics with longitudinal projects. Rotations are both at NCH and OSUWMC.

The 2 major leadership assignments in the second year are participating in Quality Leadership Academy (QLA) and Project management clinic refresh. QLA is an 8-month course that prepares the fellows to be able to lead quality improvement efforts (Link - here). The clinic refresh is another leadership assignment where the fellows will be project managers and lead a small clinic optimization following PM principles. The last six months are dedicated to electives tailored to their interests.

Electives can be varied and are designed to match the interests of each fellow in terms of content, experiences and length.

Facilities

Fellow’s primary offices will be in the NCH IS department. While at OSUWMC, they will spend time at various locations in the medical center.

Didactic Program

Across the entire two years, fellows and faculty alike partake in weekly didactics, consisting of a combination of faculty- and fellow-led presentations, a robust journal club, and fun and interactive board review question-and answer-sessions. Fellows will also complete two graduate-level courses through The Ohio State University Department of Biomedical Informatics to further expand their understanding of the basic science and methods underpinning the discipline. These courses can also be taken for credit as part of a certificate, MS or MPH program if desired.

Epic Training

Our fellows work alongside a very talented group of EHR builders at both Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Within the first two months, they travel to Epic Systems headquarters in Wisconsin for a week of in-depth training and certification as Epic Physician Builders. During that week, they also have an opportunity to meet Clinical Informatics fellows from other programs and begin to establish their peer-to-peer network—a vital component of any successful informatics career.

Patient Care

We strongly believe that our fellows need to continue providing high-quality patient care concurrent with their training in clinical informatics. At the same time, we recognize our fellows are already well-trained to practice in their primary specialty. For these reasons, we encourage our fellows to provide direct patient care at either Ohio State Wexner Medical Center or Nationwide Children’s Hospital during the two-year period, however this is not a requirement of the fellowship. If qualified and appropriately credentialed, they are permitted to separately contract in their primary specialty and receive appropriate compensation for their level of training and experience (i.e., as independently practicing attending physicians). .

Conferences

Clinical Informatics is a field built on teaching and learning from others—sharing best practices, discovering new approaches and methods, and fostering a sense of community. Nothing exemplifies this more than national meetings and symposia where faculty and fellows alike gather to share experiences, success stories and new research findings. Each year, our fellows attend the American Medical Informatics Association Clinical Informatics Conference, which includes the daylong annual Clinical Informatics fellows retreat. In addition, fellows in their first year attend the Epic Xpert Group meeting and in the second year attend Epic’s annual Users Group Meeting. Other regional, national and even international conferences are available for our fellows to attend on a case-by-case basis.

This is based on current fellowship budget which can change year to year. Since the inception of the fellowship, we have been able to successfully fund the above conferences.