The Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Fellowship is built to develop physician leaders who can apply informatics to improve care, support clinicians, and guide organizational transformation. Training emphasizes both the science of clinical informatics and the practical work of implementing change inside a complex academic health system. The program is housed in our Department of Biomedical Informatics due to generous funding, faculty support, and office space provided by DBMI. We are administratively associated with the Department of Medicine, providing GME program administrative support.
Mission and aims
The mission of the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at VH is to develop physician leaders with the knowledge, skills, and experience to design, implement, and evaluate informatics solutions that improve patient care, enhance clinical workflows, and advance healthcare delivery. We are committed to training fellows who integrate clinical expertise with informatics innovation to lead transformational change in diverse healthcare settings.
Program aims
- Develop expertise across core clinical informatics competencies.
- Prepare fellows for leadership in health system improvement.
- Promote scholarly inquiry and contribution to the field.
- Support ongoing clinical practice and integration of informatics into care delivery.
- Address evolving healthcare and community needs.
Program structure
The fellowship is a two-year program that combines didactic learning, mentored projects, operational immersion, and career development. Most formal coursework occurs alongside the Master’s Program in Applied Clinical Informatics (MSACI), allowing fellows to learn with other physician leaders and working professionals in informatics. Practical training occurs across Vanderbilt Health, HealthIT, and affiliated informatics teams.
- Didactics: Structured coursework covering core clinical informatics content and board-relevant topics
- Operational rotations: Immersive experiences with teams responsible for health IT, analytics, clinical systems, and informatics leadership
- Mentored projects: Longitudinal work focused on design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination
- Clinical practice: Continued clinical work in the fellow’s base specialty, when feasible and appropriately approved
- Mentorship: Individualized guidance from faculty and a formal mentorship committee
Clinical work, call, and moonlighting
Fellows spend a portion of their time providing direct patient care in their primary specialty area in order to maintain clinical skills and deepen their experience in clinical environments. Clinical work and any moonlighting must be structured to support, rather than interfere with, fellowship education and duty hour requirements.
- Maintaining clinical skills: Fellows may provide direct patient care in their specialty area, when feasible and appropriately approved, to maintain clinical skills and remain connected to frontline clinical practice.
- Call frequency: The fellowship generally does not require call except in unusual circumstances where the provision of direct patient care is required. Any call or extended hours are subject to Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), Vanderbilt Health, and Graduate Medical Education policies.
- Moonlighting: Any moonlighting must be approved by Vanderbilt’s Office of Graduate Medical Education and the Program Director. Moonlighting must comply with Vanderbilt Health and ACGME duty hour and moonlighting policies. Fellows must follow Vanderbilt’s Office of Graduate Medical Education moonlighting rules.
Curriculum and training experience
Fellows are trained through a blend of classroom learning and applied practice. The curriculum is designed to build competence in the full scope of clinical informatics while also giving fellows meaningful exposure to operational decision-making and implementation.
- Clinical systems and EHR optimization: clinical applications, documentation, order sets, workflows, and user-centered improvement
- Clinical decision support: design, governance, build, deployment, monitoring, and refinement of CDS interventions
- Analytics and reporting: data use for operational improvement, quality, safety, and performance measurement
- Interoperability and data standards: exchange of information across systems and settings
- Governance and strategy: prioritization, stakeholder alignment, resource management, and enterprise informatics decision-making
- Privacy, security, and ethics: responsible use of clinical data and safe implementation of digital tools
- Innovation and emerging technologies: evaluation of new informatics approaches, including analytics and machine learning in clinical contexts
Here is an example of what the 2-year fellowship program could look like for a CI fellow:
Goals and objectives
The Vanderbilt Health Clinical Informatics Fellowship is structured around the ACGME Clinical Informatics competency framework. Rather than treating the competencies as separate academic checklists, the program integrates them into longitudinal coursework, operational rotations, mentored projects, clinical practice, and scholarship. Fellows develop across the following core domains:
- Patient Care: Apply informatics methods to improve care delivery, clinical workflows, patient safety, quality, and the usability of tools used by clinicians and patients.
- Medical Knowledge: Build fluency in clinical informatics concepts, data standards, health IT systems, decision support, analytics, implementation science, ethics, privacy, and emerging technologies.
- Practice-Based Learning and Improvement: Use data, evaluation methods, quality improvement approaches, and feedback to assess informatics interventions and continuously improve systems and personal performance.
- Interpersonal and Communication Skills: Communicate effectively with clinicians, patients, technical teams, operational leaders, vendors, and other stakeholders to translate needs into safe, usable, and sustainable solutions.
- Professionalism: Demonstrate accountability, integrity, respect, equity-minded practice, responsible stewardship of data, and attention to bias, safety, privacy, and ethical use of technology.
- Systems-Based Practice: Lead change within complex healthcare organizations by aligning informatics work with governance, strategy, policy, resource constraints, regulatory requirements, and health system priorities.
For the full competency and milestone framework, see the ACGME Milestones by Specialty.
Mentorship, research, scholarship, and career development
Each fellow establishes a formal mentorship committee early in training. This committee supports project selection, scholarly development, professional growth, and long-term career planning. Fellows are expected to complete meaningful scholarly work and to contribute to the field through presentations, publications, implementation evaluations, or related dissemination.
- Mentorship committee: At least three members, including clinical informatics faculty, a clinician in the fellow’s specialty, and a senior mentor aligned with career goals
- Scholarly development: Guidance in project design, evaluation methods, writing, and presentation
- Career planning: Support for pathways in academic medicine, operational leadership, digital health, and industry
- Portfolio development: Fellows build a body of work that reflects their skills, impact, and evolving interests
Because the program is deeply connected to operational informatics, scholarship can take multiple forms. Fellows may evaluate implemented interventions, study workflow redesign, analyze digital tool performance, contribute to publications, or present innovations at regional and national meetings.