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Defining Biomedical Informatics Competency: The Foundations of a Profession

Section of Oral and Diagnostic Sciences, School of Dental and Oral Surgery, Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, 360 West 168th Street, New York, NY 10032; zim{at}columbia.edu

Is biomedical informatics a science or a profession? This question has been asked of many members in the biomedical informatics community, yet we still lack a response that galvanizes our community. We debate the issues over lunch. We create long, multi-threaded e-mail discussions, we write papers on the topic, and still we aren’t able to convince ourselves—let alone the rest of the scientific community. In this paper, I will describe a curriculum model for biomedical informatics and research that is developing at Columbia University, Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI). We believe that a strong educational foundation creates competent professionals who, in turn, comprise a bioinformatics culture. The outcome of DBMI’s curriculum design and competency project will be a set of biomedical informatics competencies which we believe will define the core knowledge and skills of the field.

KEY WORDS: Informatics • education • curriculum