The ongoing evolution of the core curriculum of a clinical fellowship in pathology informatics

The Partners HealthCare system's Clinical Fellowship in Pathology Informatics (Boston, MA, USA) faces ongoing challenges to the delivery of its core curriculum in the forms of: (1) New classes of fellows annually with new and varying educational needs and increasingly fractured, enterprise-wide commitments; (2) taxing electronic health record (EHR) and laboratory information system (LIS) implementations; and (3) increasing interest in the subspecialty at the academic medical centers (AMCs) in what is a large health care network. In response to these challenges, the fellowship has modified its existing didactic sessions and piloted both a network-wide pathology informatics lecture series and regular “learning laboratories”. Didactic sessions, which had previously included more formal discussions of the four divisions of the core curriculum: Information fundamentals, information systems, workflow and process, and governance and management, now focus on group discussions concerning the fellows’ ongoing projects, updates on the enterprise-wide EHR and LIS implementations, and directed questions about weekly readings. Lectures are given by the informatics faculty, guest informatics faculty, current and former fellows, and information systems members in the network, and are open to all professional members of the pathology departments at the AMCs. Learning laboratories consist of small-group exercises geared toward a variety of learning styles, and are driven by both the fellows and a member of the informatics faculty. The learning laboratories have created a forum for discussing real-time and real-world pathology informatics matters, and for incorporating awareness of and timely discussions about the latest pathology informatics literature. These changes have diversified the delivery of the fellowship's core curriculum, increased exposure of faculty, fellows and trainees to one another, and more equitably distributed teaching responsibilities among the entirety of the pathology informatics asset in the network. Though the above approach has been in place less than a year, we are presenting it now as a technical note to allow for further discussion of evolving educational opportunities in pathology informatics and clinical informatics in general, and to highlight the importance of having a flexible fellowship with active participation from its fellows.