The Core Content for Clinical Informatics defines the boundaries of the discipline and informs the Program Requirements for Fellowship Education in Clinical Informatics. The Core Content includes four major categories: fundamentals, clinical decision making and care process improvement, health information systems, and leadership and management of change. The AMIA Board of Directors approved the Core Content for Clinical Informatics in November 2008.

The Program Requirements for Fellowship Education identify the knowledge and skills that physicians must master through the course of a training program to be certified in the subspecialty of clinical informatics. They also specify accreditation requirements for clinical informatics training programs. The AMIA Board of Directors approved this document in November 2008.

SummaryWithin health and health care, medical informatics and its subspecialties of biomedical, clinical, and public health informatics have emerged as a new discipline with increasing demands for its own work force. Knowledge and skills in medical informatics are widely acknowledged as crucial to future success in patient care, research relating to biomedicine, clinical care, and public health, as well as health policy design. The maturity of the domain and the demand on expertise necessitate standardized training and certification of professionals. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) embarked on a major effort to create professional level education and certification for physicians of various professions and specialties in informatics. This article focuses on the AMIA effort in the professional structure of medical specialization, e.g., the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and the related Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). This report summarizes the current progress to create a recognized sub-certificate of competence in Clinical Informatics and discusses likely near term (three to five year) implications on training, certification, and work force with an emphasis on clinical applied informatics.

Realizing the vast medical benefits of validated protocols, recommendations and practice guidelines requires acceptance and implementation by frontline care providers. Knowledge translation is the science of accelerating the transfer of knowledge to practice by understanding and creatively addressing the barriers that prevent adoption of new professional standards. In an attempt to improve patient care and reduce mortality, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign and The Institute for Healthcare Improvement created the resuscitation and management bundles for patients with severe sepsis and septic shock. These bundles have been accepted as best practice by many clinicians since multiple clinical trials have produced similar positive results when they were implemented. However, transferring these research outcomes-based guidelines to the clinical practice arena has been associated with poor compliance due to important barriers to implementation. Delays in the adoption of sepsis bundles are not surprising since the time from validation to implementation of a new clinical practice is typically 17 years. Using sepsis bundles as a model, this article explores why guidelines are important, examines physician adherence to protocols, and reviews the literature on strategies to improve clinical compliance and enhance knowledge translation.

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