Meanwhile, Dr. Peter Killoran, a Texas anesthesiologist, is using his CI training to help track patient outcomes and evaluate data for the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Killoran’s work includes improving health care quality and safety through health information technology and biomedical informatics.
"Quality improvement is a big part of the curriculum for this specialty," said Dr. Killoran, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at the UTHealth Medical School. "That’s because increasingly, medicine is focusing on improving outcomes and the rational use of heath care resources, and all of that comes down to the data."
As the field of CI continues to grow, health providers are needed to participate in the subspecialty and add their voices, said Dr. Genevieve Melton-Meaux, of the department of surgery at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and a faculty fellow for the university’s Institute for Health Informatics. She was recently CI certified.
"The electronic health record and health information technology are the ‘nervous system’ of clinical care," she said. "There are important opportunities to improve the design, implementation, optimization, and use of these technologies and their resultant data, which will ultimately help to improve the efficiency and safety of health care, as well as improve the process of clinical discovery."