Osteopathic physicians, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and others working in medical informatics are closer to obtaining certification as informatics experts, a role that's become increasingly important as Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement is more closely tied to data and metrics.
The board of the American Medical Informatics Association has approved the eligibility requirements for sitting an exam, a key early step toward creating the designation, which will be called AHIC, short for advanced health informatics certification.
“We want to create a credential that's open to the entire informatics community,” said Dr. Douglas Fridsma, president and CEO of AMIA, a professional association for medical informaticists. But it's going to take two more years or so before the first class of applicants will able to take a test and earn that designation, Fridsma said.
The goal is to develop a credentialing program with “comparable rigor to the clinical informatics subspeciality for physicians” launched three years ago, according to an AMIA statement.
To be eligible for the designation, an applicant must have at least 18 months of work experience in medical informatics in the U.S. or Canada, completed over a three-year period in the past five years; a master's degree or higher in a primary health profession and a master's or higher in health informatics, or a doctoral degree in clinical or health informatics.
There are now 1,105 physician subspecialists in informatics, credentialed either by the American Board of Preventative Medicine or the American Board of Pathology, which also sponsors an informatics subspecialty, according to a list on the AMIA website.
That number of credentialed informaticists is likely to multiply once the new certification program is in place.
It's too early to tell what impact credentialing of physicians has had on their pay or employment prospects and for many veteran informaticists, physicians or not, adding the new AHIC credential will do little to enhance their already considerable credibility, Fridsma said.
But as the fast-growing field of informatics expands, employers are going to want to know the difference between a person who merely “dabbles” in health information technology and someone who is both trained and experienced, Fridsma said.
Medical informatics, “used to be a guild and a cottage industry and it's becoming more professional in its approach,” Fridsma said. Informaticists are “looking for a way to distinguish themselves and this is one way to make that happen.”
