Informatics
The growing role of information technology within health care delivery has created the need to deepen the pool of informaticians who can help organizations maximize the effectiveness of their investment in information technology and in so doing maximize the impact on safety, quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of care.
The UCLA Health system has been named among the nation’s “Most Wired” by Hospitals and Health Networks magazine and has been honored with the HIMSS Analytics Acute Care Stage 7 Award, representing the highest level of electronic medical record progress at hospitals and health systems (a distinction awarded to only 1.2% of U.S. hospitals) and 1 of only 4 sites worldwide to have achieved Stage 7 in three distinct areas: inpatient, ambulatory, and analytics.
The UCLA Psychiatry Residency Training Program offers a variety of opportunities for residents with an interest in informatics.
The UCLA Health Resident Informaticist Program provides clinician trainees with a general understanding of Clinical and Health Informatics topics. The program embraces a practical hands-on approach in order to attain tangible results. Monthly meetings cover a wide variety of topics and help provide a deeper understanding of how Health IT and Clinical Informatics can be leveraged to effectively utilize the EHR. Additionally, resident informaticists will complete an independent program practicum. Resident informaticists receive an educational stipend upon satisfactory completion of their independent program practicum and attendance at the required meetings. UCLA residents (PGY-2 and higher) and fellows are eligible to apply.
There is a strong tradition of psychiatry trainees participating in the Resident Informaticist Program which has resulted in tangible improvements to the clinical workflow. Recent projects have included:
- Creating a Cardiometabolic Risk Screening Tool for patients at risk of developing metabolic syndrome secondary to antipsychotic use
- Assigning numeric values to each aspect of the mental status exam to allow for visual tracking of patient outcomes over time
- Implementing ratings scale-based monitoring of psychiatric symptom burden in a primary care setting
- Replacing hand-written forms for legal holds with electronic versions that can be filled out more easily and cannot be lost or misplaced
- Embedding relevant laboratory results directly within the order screen for antipsychotics and mood stabilizers (e.g., displaying the most recent TSH, Cr, and urine pregnancy when ordering lithium)
This two-year fellowship in Clinical Informatics is open to graduates of residency programs in any specialty. The fellowship’s goal is to develop leaders with expertise in biomedical informatics and health information technology who are prepared to advance the science and practice of clinical informatics within health care delivery systems. The fellowship will provide physicians with experiential training in alignment with ACGME guidelines. Upon successful completion of the two-year program, fellows will be eligible for board certification in clinical informatics. The program’s educational experiences will consist of rotations, didactic sessions (including courses), an independent research project, and the option to practice in the fellow’s primary clinical specialty. For more information, visit https://www.uclahealth.org/clinical-informatics-fellowship.
The UCLA Health system is dedicated to making sure that the electronic medical record works for physicians and not the other way around. To this end, it supports over 25 Physician Informaticists in developing expertise in all aspects of understanding and promoting effective organization, analysis, management, and use of clinical information in Epic. Jonathan Heldt, the Physician Informaticist for the Department of Psychiatry, is also an Associate Program Director and is in a good position to help residents with an interest in informatics to develop throughout their training. For more information on UCLA Physician Informaticists, please visit http://careconnect.uclahealth.org/body.cfm?id=129.
A dedicated UCLA Biodesign Innovation Fellowship track is available to current UCLA Health residents and fellows and offers trainees the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of product development, from the identification of clinical opportunities to the initiation of a new venture. For more information, visit biodesign.ucla.edu.
The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Semel Institute is actively conducting research at the interface of informatics, data science, and computational psychiatry. The research landscape at UCLA is ripe with opportunities for residents interested in exploring this area. The UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) is a research partnership of UCLA, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, and the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. The CTSI Informatics Program provides access to electronic health record (EHR) data across multiple institutions, builds computation resources for data management, analysis and sharing and formulates and implements coordinated plans for providing data security. For more information, see https://ctsi.ucla.edu/. Informatics research by UCLA psychiatry residents has been presented at the American Psychiatric Association, APA IPS: The Mental Health Services conference, the American Medical Informatics Association Summit, and other national meetings.
If you are interested in discussing opportunities in informatics at UCLA, please feel free to contact Jonathan Heldt (Physician Informaticist and Associate Program Director) at jheldt@mednet.ucla.edu.