Clinical Informatics, Certificate

By the completion of the Clinical Informatics graduate certificate, students will develop core competencies in four key areas: foundations and theory, clinical decision making and care process improvement, health information systems, and leadership and change management, as defined by the American Medical Informatics Association.

Graduates will walk away with the following competencies, and more:

• Describe the key concepts of Clinical Informatics, Nursing Informatics, Pharmacy Informatics, and Clinical Research Informatics. 
• Analyze key concepts, models, and theories of informatics 
• Analyze quality improvement efforts regarding safety, effectiveness, efficiency, patient-centeredness, timeliness, and equity. 
• Understand the nature and cognitive aspects of human decision making. 
• Understand evidence-based medicine, evidence sources, evidence grading, implementation of guidelines, and information retrieval and analysis 
• Build effective of interdisciplinary leadership teams and communication strategies.
• Critically evaluate health information systems applications by type of functionality, setting where systems are used, telehealth capabilities, and relationship to the electronic health record.

The knowledge and skills in Clinical Informatics are crucial to future success in patient care, biomedical research, and public health, as well as to health policy design and implementation The American Medical Informatics Association (www.amia.org) estimates that 70,000 trained specialists are needed in the near future to support these efforts, with other estimates in 2018 as high as 150,000 specialists.

Physicians who specialize in Clinical Informatics assess the information needs of providers and patients, analyze clinical processes, and implement clinical information systems. They provide leadership and expertise in the procurement, customization, development, implementation, management, evaluation, and continuous improvement of clinical information systems. They work with a large range of computational systems, including electronic health record systems, decision-support systems, practice management tools, imaging systems, clinical research systems, public health systems, and genomic systems. They find employment as Chief Medical Information Officers, researchers, educators, and in industry, all of which are in high demand.

The 12 credits earned from your certificate can be used toward a MS in Clinical Informatics. 

The 34-credit M.S. in Clinical Informatics is organized around an additional graduate certificate in Data Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, along 10 credits of hands-on practicums and conferences.