A Discipline in Disarray
Chapter 10 Bedside Questions · 9 questions · about 9 minutes
Clinical informatics has no protected Name, no standard Form, and no defined Function, so organizations hire the title without defining scope, reporting line, staff, budget or measures, then conclude informatics does not work. At least 10 routes lead to the title and only 2 are built to produce the Diagnostician.
Root cause analysis / M&M conference on a failed drug trial: the drug (informatics) looked like it failed because patients got no dose, a placebo, or a miscalculated fraction of the dose.
Answer as your executive team would, with the evidence in hand. Each question has a factual answer in a system you already own.
Does your informatics leader hold a clinical informatics degree or fellowship, with operational experience and executive participation, and can you name the credential without looking it up?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Which of the four Chapter 9 competencies were they formally trained in versus learned by doing?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Does the clinical informatics workforce report to that person, with a dedicated budget and staffing plan?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Do you require anything beyond a clinical degree and willingness to participate before granting an informatics title?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Is there a defined job description and career path for clinicians doing informatics work?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Are you sponsoring internal candidates into formal informatics training, or relying entirely on external recruitment from a narrowed supply channel?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Who can describe in one sentence the difference between a vendor-certified analyst and a board-certified clinical informaticist?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
When you last hired for an informatics title, who wrote the job description, and had they ever done the work?
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
Score the six success conditions (education and preparation, funding, positioning, empowering, staffing, employing), and ask whether past results are evidence about the role or about the dose.
Add a note: where is the evidence, or who owns it?
A reflection tool from the book, not a validated diagnostic test or benchmark. Your answers and notes stay in this browser unless you choose to send them. Please don't enter patient information.
A profession with no definition, no standard deployment, and no published results is not yet a profession. It is a name in circulation.
The Diagnostician, Chapter 10