The Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program graduated its first class in June 2022.
Daniel Liu, M.D.; Lori Wong, M.D., MPH; and Jacob Wooldridge, M.D., made up the first graduating class.
The program is the first Clinical Informatics Fellowship in Arkansas and one of about 50 nationwide. Its application was approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) in 2019 and it welcomed its first cohort of fellows in July 2020.
Drs. Liu and Wong were the first fellows. Dr. Liu is a pediatrician and trained at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH), working closely with Fellowship Program Director Dr. Pele Yu. Dr. Wong trained in preventative medicine and was based at UAMS Medical Center for her clinical informatics work, working closely with Fellowship UAMS Site Director Dr. Joseph Sanford.
They were joined in July 2021 by Dr. Wooldridge, who transferred to UAMS from the Clinical Informatics fellowship at Stony Brook University. Dr. Wooldridge is a pathologist and his primary training site for the fellowship was UAMS Medical Center.
“We are proud to see the hard work of establishing this fellowship program come to fruition with our first graduating class,” Dr. Yu said. “Informaticians are at the forefront of leadership and health information technology and are an important part of moving medicine into the future.”
During their time in the program, the fellows performed the day-to-day tasks of working clinical informaticians by embedding in the respective working groups at ACH and UAMS. They rotated in a variety of key clinical informatics topics, including quality improvement, innovations, data warehousing, digital health, data standards, leadership, clinical decision support, change management and more. They published research and presented to local, regional, national, and international scientific audiences.
“As the newest medical subspecialty, Clinical Informatics can add significant value to a health care organization through system design, deployment, standardization, analysis and data visualization,” Dr. Sanford said. “Congratulations to our seniors, and welcome to the profession.”
The program accepts one fellow from an adult specialty and one pediatric specialty training background annually. Visit the program website for more information. The program is supported by Arkansas Children’s Hospital, UAMS Medical Center, the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI), and the Translational Research Institute.
