Postdoctoral training in medical informatics: a survey of National Library of Medicine-supported fellows

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) funds training programs in medical informatics and plans to significantly increase the number of program sites in the future. The authors surveyed all NLM-funded trainees at the nine sites supported in the spring of 1988 to determine their backgrounds, current research interests, and career plans. Forty-three fellows were identified, of whom 39 returned a mailed questionnaire. All but four were physicians (89.7%), 82.1% had at least one year of postdoctoral clinical training, and 61.5% had completed a residency. Seventy-one percent of those completing residency had done so in internal medicine. The most common areas of current research were decision support/decision analysis, knowledge representation, and artificial intelligence. The overwhelming majority of the fellows planned to seek positions in a medical school on completion of their fellowships, and most preferred affiliation with a department of medical informatics or medicine.