A new program being offered this fall through Vanderbilt University School of Medicine will offer health care professionals the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in the growing biomedical informatics field.
The Department of Biomedical Informatics is launching a two-year Master of Science in Applied Clinical Informatics (MSACI) program, which is designed for clinicians and experienced professionals from other health disciplines who desire rigorous, practical informatics training. The program emphasizes a theoretical and practical understanding of the foundations of clinical informatics, health systems, health information technology and organizational leadership.
The program is designed for working health care professionals. Courses are offered in intensive evening and weekend sessions, likely one evening per week and one weekend per month, as well as online instruction.
Biomedical informatics, which focuses on the management of health information in clinical practice and research, has become increasingly important as medical institutions and public health officials look for data-driven methods to improve health across large populations of patients and to precisely target treatments, said Josh Peterson, M.D., MPH, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine, who will serve as director for the degree program.
“We are the largest biomedical informatics department in the country, well positioned to train health care professionals for this exciting new specialty devoted to advancing the application of informatics in health care,” Peterson said.
For physicians seeking subspecialty board certification in Clinical Informatics, the MSACI degree program will satisfy education certification requirements and prepare students to sit for the board exam. The program will also provide the didactic component of Vanderbilt’s ACGME-accredited clinical informatics fellowship (application in review), which will become the only pathway to certification in 2018, Peterson said.
More information can be found at https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/dbmi/master-s-science-applied-clinical-informatics.
