Making health informatics competencies useful: an applied health informatics competency self-assessment system

Years ago we undertook to define Health Informatics (HI) competencies. This effort resulted in the creation of a document that articulated HI roles, the challenges faced by HI professionals, the high-level tasks that they needed to undertake to address these challenges and the competencies (skills, knowledge, and experience) they needed to complete these tasks. Unfortunately, in so doing we created what is arguably the most boring book in history, shoes contents are very difficult to extract, use, maintain and improve. We report here the completion of a pilot of a system that we believe corrects this situation. It is a webbased tool that incorporates all of the material, from roles to detailed competencies, enabling them to be accessed and used for a variety of purposes, the most notable of which is professional self-assessment.