Health Informatics education occurs in academic programs awarding baccalaureate, masters, and professional doctoral degrees. The master’s degree has a set of Accreditation Standards that ensure the quality of the education. Standards for the baccalaureate and professional doctorate are under development. Students entering these programs come from a variety of backgrounds, e.g., engineering, computer science, healthcare, and others. Education may also occur as a specialty within clinical degree programs, e.g., medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, dentistry, and others. CAHIIM considers informatics to be health informatics when used for healthcare delivery to be essentially the same regardless of the group involved.
Clinical Informatics is concerned with information use in health care by clinicians. Clinical informatics includes a wide range of topics ranging from clinical decision support, visual images, clinical documentation, provider order entry systems, information system design, information system implementation, and information system adoption issues.
Health Informatics professionals may practice in health care delivery, health information systems and imaging industry, health informatics education programs, and health informatics standards and policy development.
CAHIIM attends and presents at health informatics conferences concerning their accreditation processes and their Standards for Accreditation. Check the Events page to see the details of these conferences.
Call to Action: Career Paths
CAHIIM calls for the development of a stakeholder-endorsed career paths model that incorporates multiple, coordinated career paths for informatics professionals in healthcare. Click on the link below to learn more.