This book reviews and defines the current state of the art for informatics education in medicine and health care. This field has undergone considerable change as the field of informatics itself has evolved. Twenty years ago almost the only individuals involved in health care who had even heard the term “informatics” were those who identified themselves as medical or nursing informaticians. Today, we have a variety of subfields of informatics including not just medical and nursing informatics, but informatics applied to specific health professions (such as dental or pharmacy informatics), as well as biomedical informatics, bioinformatics and public health informatics.
The book addresses the broad range of informatics education programs available today. The Editor and experienced internationally recognized informatics educators who have contributed to this work have made the tacit knowledge explicit and shared some of the lessons they have learned. This book therefore represents the key reference for all involved in the informatics education whether they be trainers or trainees.
Eta S. Berner, Ed.D., received her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is currently Professor of Health Services Administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). She is Co-Director of the Biomedical Informatics Component in the UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and is co-chair of the national CTSA Informatics Key Function Operations Committee. She is also the founding Director of UAB’s new Center for Health Informatics for Patient Safety and Quality. Dr. Berner has been teaching in UAB’s Master of Science in Health Informatics Program for over 14 years and is Principal Investigator of one of five Curriculum Development Centers funded by the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to develop a national curriculum for Health Information Technology. Dr. Berner is a Fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. She has published articles in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Academic Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. She is the editor of a Springer book entitled Clinical Decision Support Systems: Theory and Practice (second edition, 2007). She has served on a variety of external review committees for federal grantees developing clinical decision support interventions. Dr. Berner has been a World Health Organization consultant, and has served in leadership positions nationally in the US in professional informatics and health professions educational organizations, most recently as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Berner is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the International Journal of Medical Informatics and the Journal of Healthcare Information Management.
