Career Path and Fellowship Opportunities
Clinical informatics is a subspecialty that collaborates with other healthcare and information technology professionals to promote safe, efficient, effective, timely, patient-centered and equitable patient care. Pathologists who specialize in clinical informatics (also known as pathology informaticists or pathology informaticians) serve as medical directors for laboratory information systems and/or the laboratory components of electronic health records (EHRs). In addition, they lead, oversee, and support technological advances in all areas of the laboratory for improvements in patient care. Residents who are interested in pursuing clinical informatics as a specialty need to have a strong desire to improve patient care through the integration of people, information, and technology. With the tsunami of artificial intelligence and machine learning, pathology departments are more eager than ever to hire pathologists with clinical informatics expertise.
While pathologists generally comprise 1% of the overall physician population in the United States, they currently make up over 7% of the board-certified clinical informaticists. This speaks to the importance of clinical informatics to the pathology specialty. Pathologists who are board-certified in clinical informatics often serve their institutions by leading innovation in the use of pathology and laboratory data and related resources.
Are you interested in pursuing clinical informatics?
Clinical Informatics Fellowship Training
Clinical Informatics is a two-year fellowship co-sponsored by the American Board of Pathology (ABP) and the American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM). The fellowship prepares trainees for leadership in diverse informatics disciplines, including health information systems management, clinical data analytics, machine learning/AI applications in medicine, and process improvement in patient care. Because of its unique nature, clinical informatics is a subspecialty that’s open to physicians who have completed ACGME-accredited training in any of the 24 current primary specialties (eg, surgery, family medicine, and others).
Clinical informatics is an ACGME-accredited fellowship, and its fellowship programs can be housed within any medical specialty. Some programs are housed within pathology, and those that are housed in non-pathology departments frequently have pathologists on faculty, often serving as fellowship program directors. Regardless of the setting, all trainees are required to take the same board exam on the same topics. This ensures they all meet a consistent standard of knowledge in clinical informatics, which benefits both their careers and the healthcare system through their leadership.
Just like any other specialty, each clinical informatics fellowship has its own unique culture, as well as its own strengths and weaknesses with regard to the experiences that it provides to fellows. All candidates are advised to research the list of available fellowships and to apply to those that will provide the experiences and culture that they feel will be best for their overall training and future career goals. The College of American Pathologists (CAP) has listed programs below which are known to be housed in a pathology department, have a pathologist as program director, or otherwise have a strong pathology and laboratory medicine informatics component. If you know of programs which should be added to this list, please contact the CAP Informatics Committee.
There are currently two pathways for trainees to become certified in clinical informatics. A candidate may sit for board certification after successful completion of a two-year ACGME-accredited clinical informatics fellowship. For any physician planning to take two fellowships, this second pathway can take the form of an integrated training experience in which clinical informatics and another fellowship program are taken together. This typically shortens the training duration by one year by taking advantage of clinical informatics’ natural compatibility with other specialties for research and the individualized curriculum components of both fellowships. Such integrated training must be pre-approved by the respective medical boards for each fellowship in order for the fellow to sit for both board examinations.
The second pathway is the practice pathway. This allows candidates to sit for board certification after demonstrating specified contributions and working in the field without undertaking an ACGME-accredited clinical informatics fellowship. At a minimum, candidates must have either been practicing in clinical informatics for at least 25% of a full-time equivalent (FTE) for a minimum of three years, or have completed a master’s or PhD in biomedical informatics that meets certain criteria specified by the ABPM. This pathway will expire in 2025.