Graduate certificates: healthcare or clinical informatics

More universities are offering graduate certificates to busy working professionals who may not wish to invest the time and energy to pursue a graduate degree. While a certificate is not equivalent to a certification, it provides value for professionals interested in developing, understanding, managing and integrating medical information systems in healthcare organizations.

Here are a few examples of graduate certificate programs in healthcare or clinical informatics:

UMass Boston Healthcare Informatics Certificate
UC Davis Health Informatics Certificate Program
USF Health’s Graduate Certificate in Health Informatics
Drexel University Certificate in Healthcare Informatics
Boston University Health Informatics Graduate Certificate

Physicians may also wish to consider pursuing board certification in clinical informatics. Broadly speaking, there have been two different possible pathways for subspecialty certification eligibility in clinical informatics by the American Board of Preventive Medicine (or the American Board of Pathology if you're a pathologist):

1. ACGME Accredited Fellowship Pathway
2. Practice Pathway

In the future, the only pathway for physicians to board certification in clinical informatics will be by completing a fellowship.

Nurses can pursue certification in informatics from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

Some may choose to obtain a masters degree in informatics. Those programs may be called clinical informatics, medical informatics, health informatics, healthcare informatics, biomedical informatics, bioinformatics, etc. While those may all sound like they refer to the same curriculum, there are some key differences across those different types of programs.