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| Long Range Plan 2000-2005 | |
Printer-friendly VersionGOAL 3 - STRENGTHEN THE INFORMATICS INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR BIOMEDICINE AND
HEALTH
OBJECTIVE 3.2 -
FURTHER TRAINING IN MEDICAL INFORMATION AND LIBRARIANSHIP
FINDINGS
NLM sponsors a variety of medical informatics training programs for health professionals and individual biologists. Over the past decade the Library has established new individual fellowships in applied medical informatics and informatics research and has increased the formal academic medical informatics programs at major universities from 10 to 12. One of the academic programs is entirely focused on training in bioinformatics and some others have bioinformatics tracks. This provides a base for NLM to assist in the NIH-wide initiative to increase the number of researchers with advanced training in computational biology.
To provide an introduction to medical informatics for health professionals, health sciences librarians, and computer scientists, NLM sponsors semiannual intensive 1-week courses in medical informatics at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. This extremely popular program was instituted in 1992 and expanded to two sessions per year in 1999.
There
are also several informatics training programs at NLM itself. NLM’s
Lister Hill Center (LHC) directs the NIH clinical elective in medical
informatics for medical students and also provides training for
individual visiting scientists and students. NLM’s National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI) accepts postdoctoral fellows and
visiting scientists for work and training at the NCBI.
After the publication of the Long Range Plan report on the Education and Training of Health Science Librarians, NLM funded challenge grants which led to the development of new courses and masters’ programs at several schools of library and information science, and to an expanded internship program at an academic health sciences center. The Library has also established additional slots for librarians recruited by any of the 12 NLM Informatics Research Training programs, and a new fellowship in applied medical informatics for those in other fields. The highly successful Library Associate Fellowship Program, which has brought recent library school graduates to NLM for a 1-year training program for m o re than 40 years, has recently doubled the number of trainee slots and expanded to an optional second year of mentored experience at an outside institution w h e re librarians participate in multidisciplinary teams supporting clinical, educational, or research programs .
PROGRAM PLANS
ACADEMIC TRAINING PROGRAMS
- Support the NIH-wide effort to expand the number of researchers capable of working in computational biology by expanding on existing NLM-supported informatics training programs.
- Promote collaborative training efforts between NLM-funded informatics research training pro-grams and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (formerly the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research—AHCPR)-funded health services research training programs.
- Broaden the spectrum of health professionals who receive medical informatics training (e.g. nurses, dentists, hospital administrators, public health professionals).
- Support and encourage minority institutions in medical informatics training.
- Encourage the development of executive master’s degree programs in informatics.
ADULT LEARNING
- Expand use of distance learning technology as one mechanism for providing continuing education in the use of information and NLM information services.
- Develop American Medical Association (AMA) Category I Continuing Medical Education (CME) Internet offerings in health informatics.
- Investigate the possibility of offering Woods Hole-type courses via distance education methods.
- Explore the development of a new mid-career training program for health sciences librarians, which would involve nomination by top administrators, onsite experience at institutions which have integrated the library into clinical, research, and/or educational activities, mentoring, and possibly sup-port for hiring temporary replacements for people participating in the program.
- Explore the need and mechanisms for expanding the supply of specialist librarians in three areas: (a) clinical informatics—to work directly in the clinical intensive care setting, providing just-in-time, patient-specific information, (b) health policy—to provide advanced assistance to health policy make r s and public health professionals with information needs that span many disciplines, (c) bio-informatics— to assist researchers in sophisticated use of molecular biology and genetic databases.
MINORITY RECRUITMENT
- Work with the Medical Library Association (MLA), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), public schools, and other appropriate organizations to recruit more people from minority groups into health sciences librarianship and informatics. Provide opportunities for practice at NLM for re c i p i e n t s of minority scholarships to library schools.
EVALUATION
- Review and assess the impact on health sciences librarianship of the NLM Associate Fellowship program, the number of informatics fellowships available to librarians, and the Woods Hole Medical Informatics course.
Last updated: 18 March 2001
First published: 18 March 2001
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content