Teaching Hands-On Informatics Skills to Future Health Informaticians: A Competency Framework Proposal and Analysis of Health Care Informatics Curricula

BACKGROUND: Existing health informatics curriculum requirements mostly use a competency-based approach rather than a skill-based one. OBJECTIVE: The main objective of this study was to assess the current skills training requirements in graduate health informatics curricula to evaluate graduate students’ confidence in specific health informatics skills. METHODS: A quantitative cross-sectional observational study was developed to evaluate published health informatics curriculum requirements and to determine the comprehensive health informatics skill sets required in a research university in New York, United States. In addition, a questionnaire to assess students’ confidence about specific health informatics skills was developed and sent to all enrolled and graduated Master of Science students in a health informatics program. RESULTS: The evaluation was performed in a graduate health informatics program, and analysis of the students’ self-assessments questionnaire showed that 79.4% (81/102) of participants were not confident (not at all confident or slightly confident) about developing an artificial intelligence app, 58.8% (60/102) were not confident about designing and developing databases, and 54.9% (56/102) were not confident about evaluating privacy and security infrastructure. Less than one-third of students (24/105, 23.5%) were confident (extremely confident and very confident) that they could evaluate the use of data capture technologies and develop mobile health informatics apps (10/102, 9.8%). CONCLUSIONS: Health informatics programs should consider specialized tracks that include specific skills to meet the complex health care delivery and market demand, and specific training components should be defined for different specialties. There is a need to determine new competencies and skill sets that promote inductive and deductive reasoning from diverse and various data platforms and to develop a comprehensive curriculum framework for health informatics skills training.