Comparing health/medical informatics graduate program curricula against two sets of professional criteria

Students often have a difficult time determining the differences among training programs and deciding which best meets their needs, especially in the area of health and medical informatics, where training programs often have similar names but very different content. This manuscript describes a methodology for systematically analyzing the content of graduate programs in health and medical informatics. This methodology attempts to determine if the systematic analysis of published competencies can be used to identify differences among the ever-increasing number of informatics graduate programs. The authors use the methodology to compare four graduate informatics programs to two sets of professional criteria: the Certified Professional in Healthcare Information Management Systems (CPHIMS) exam objectives published by HIMSS and the recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Working Group for Education (WG1) for competencies in medical informatics. This article discusses similarities and differences among the programs. Criteria and the implications of the differences are described.