Activities

Activities

 

First year of fellowship

 

The first year of fellowship is more structured, by design. UCSF provides a baseline level of knowledge, experience, and skills to all 1st year fellows to set them up for success during the rest of their fellowship. Required activities during the 1st year:

  • Participate in Weekly UCSF didactics
  • Take Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics courses in Clinical Informatics
  • Complete Epic training specifically designed for CI fellows
  • Complete Epic SQL training, get access to Clarity database, write at least 1 query
  • Obtain access to deidentified clinical data through the information commons
  • Attend Monthly UCSF Health Informatics Grand Rounds (HIGR)
  • Participate in National Clinical Informatics lectures
  • Attend UCSF informatics governance meetings related to the EHR, APIs, security, etc.
  • Organize the Bay Area Medical Informatics Symposium (with Stanford)
  • At minimum, meet monthly with an assigned mentor for project/career guidance (rotates q3 months)
  • Triage IT tickets/Best Practice Alerts/Ordersets
  • Obtain Lean training

The above requirements are only part of a fellow's learning experience, most of which is experiential and project-based. Fellows find projects in a variety of ways, including:

  • Personal areas of interests
  • Division/Department/Health system needs
  • Ongoing projects/research with faculty members
  • Attending informatics related governance meetings such as the APeX Clinical Content Committee
  • Taking over/expanding upon previous fellow projects
  • National networking through BAMIS, ACIF, AMIA, and AMDIS organizations
  • Collaborating with outsides groups such as incubators at Berkeley, and Data Science Students at the University of San Francisco
  • Assessing emerging technologies

The first 3 months of fellowship tend to have more coursework and classes and networking with our world class informatics faculty and begin projects; time to develop and complete projects that align with their career interests and goals follows soon thereafter.

Second year of fellowship

By the 2nd year of fellowship, our fellows will have developed a strong foundation and skillset in clinical informatics, with focused interests. Many required activities from the 1st year become optional in the 2nd year, allowing more time to focus on the completion of major projects and skill development, networking, and job hunting. In addition, fellows in the 2nd year are responsible for coordinating Health Informatics Grand Rounds—an excellent opportunity to learn and network in addition to promoting and enriching the UCSF Health Informatics experience.