Clinical Informatics Fellowship
The University of Washington Clinical Informatics Fellowship provides comprehensive and world-class training in clinical informatics for physicians who want to make a difference in the world. The program started in 2015 as one of the early fellowship programs established in our specialty. The curriculum is developed by faculty in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education (BIME) in collaboration with senior leaders in UW Medicine Information Technology Services (ITS), and the Department of Family Medicine is our sponsoring department. Our program is ACGME accredited and welcomes physician applicants from nearly all medical disciplines.
Our Program Objective is to:
Support the UW mission of “To improve the health of the public” by training fellows in an invigorating, supportive, diverse, and inclusive environment where they will carefully apply informatics theory in ways that lead to measurable and equitable improvements in clinical processes and patient/family outcomes.
Our fellowship is designed to provide real-world mentorship with real-world impact. Our program is applied in nature and the two-year curriculum is organized into 4 core rotations where fellows are paired with senior informatics physician leaders at UW Medicine, including members of the Chief Clinical Information Officer team and the Chief Data Officer. The 4 core rotations span 3 months each and are repeated in the first and second years. They are organized into:
1. Inpatient Informatics
2. Ambulatory Informatics
3. Enterprise Computing (analytics, data visualization, system-wide quality improvement)
4. Priority Projects
Fellows rotate in settings spanning from community sites to county hospitals to tertiary care sites, including the University of Washington Medical Center and Harborview Medical Center.
Our program is currently funded for 4 regular-track fellows by UW Medicine and 1 pediatrics-track fellow by Seattle Children’s Hospital. Fellows are funded for 90% informatics work and 10% clinical time. This close cooperation between UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s includes rotations at Seattle Children’s Hospital working with the Children’s Hospital Association’s award-winning Clinical Effectiveness program. This program has created over 70 clinical pathways with clinical decision support and reporting dashboards that inform quality improvement and patient safety interventions. They also work closely with the Chief Medical Information Officer and Provider Informatics team at Seattle Children’s.
We believe that the best way to learn applied clinical informatics is by doing high-value project-based work for the health system. We provide structured mentorship, including weekly meetings with the Program Director and supervising core rotation faculty during the first year to provide foundational education and guided skill development. Mentorship continues during the second year but with graduated autonomy for fellows to lead projects and mentor others. In addition to rotation work on contemporary informatics initiatives at UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s Hospital, formal didactics are provided through BIME’s online Master of Science degree program in Clinical Informatics and Patient-Centered Technologies (CIPCT) along with small group teaching in the first year Informatics Continuity experience (where we teach Python, Improvement Science, and Machine Learning, among other topics).
For information on how to apply, please see the Clinical Informatics Fellowship application page.
Our fellows have come from a wide range of disciplines including Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Emergency Medicine, Endocrinology (Adult), Family Medicine, General Surgery, Hematology-Oncology (Pediatric), Otolaryngology (Pediatric), Pathology and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.