Welcome to Vanderbilt University’s ACGME-accredited Clinical Informatics Fellowship program
Vanderbilt has one of the largest biomedical informatics departments in the US with a long history of developing clinical informatics solutions and training students to enter the health information technology workforce. Vanderbilt uses faculty and trainee-led innovation to address challenges in the management of information, delivery of decision support, implementation and maintenance of informatics systems, and innovation in the clinical informatics realm.
Vanderbilt Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) has over 115 primary and secondary faculty, with secondary faculty from virtually every major clinical department. Currently Vanderbilt has over 30 clinical informatics faculty, all of whom have some degree of operational responsibility including oversight of clinician and patient-facing systems developed by faculty or, in some cases, our trainees.
Faculty and trainees in DBMI conduct informatics research across the breadth of biomedicine, including research in clinical informatics, bioinformatics (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.), pharmacogenomics, systems biology, translational informatics, personalized medicine, and computational informatics.
We also have a strong affiliation with HealthIT @ VUMC organization that is entrusted with responsibility for: (a) providing the essential information infrastructure for patient care, management, research and education -- including the support for informatics-related research and, (b) fusing scholarly research in biomedical informatics with the dissemination of the resultant knowledge to individuals through its education programs and into operation through the infrastructure. The synergy between our academic department and HealthIT creates an unparalleled multidisciplinary and collaborative environment for informatics innovation, implementation, research, and education.
Faculty within DBMI who have operational positions within the HealthIT @ VUMC team implement, manage, and improve health information technology applications and tools at Vanderbilt. The integration of faculty into the application of informatics allows for evaluation of informatics tools and research on their effectiveness and safety. For the education of the Clinical Informatics Fellows, faculty-mentored practicum experiences with existing operational teams will be critical to their development as clinical informatics practitioners who improve patient care through the application of informatics tools. This infrastructure has resulted in millions of dollars of funding annually. Fellows learn how to exploit knowledge from a rigorous academic program leading to an MS in Applied Clinical Informatics (MSACI) in order to design, implement, and evaluate real-world informatics applications. The medical center benefits from a modern information technology infrastructure and architecture in the 21st century to achieve a scale of productivity not possible with traditional systems.