Beyond information retrieval and electronic health record use: competencies in clinical informatics for medical education

Physicians in the 21st century will increasingly interact in diverse ways with information systems, requiring competence in many aspects of clinical informatics. In recent years, many medical school curricula have added content in information retrieval (search) and basic use of the electronic health record. However, this omits the growing number of other ways that physicians are interacting with information that includes activities such as clinical decision support, quality measurement and improvement, personal health records, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. We describe a process whereby six faculty members representing different perspectives came together to define competencies in clinical informatics for a curriculum transformation process occurring at Oregon Health & Science University. From the broad competencies, we also developed specific learning objectives and milestones, an implementation schedule, and mapping to general competency domains. We present our work to encourage debate and refinement as well as facilitate evaluation in this area.