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What is the Academic Forum?

The Academic Forum is a new membership unit within the American Medical Informatics Association dedicated to serving the needs of post-baccalaureate biomedical and health informatics training programs. The Academic Forum was conceived by recognized leaders to establish a professional home for academic informatics within AMIA. A current individual or institutional AMIA membership is required for participation in the Academic Forum. The benefits of membership include:

Creating an acknowledged professional home for leaders of academic biomedical and health informatics programs
Sharing knowledge and best practices to advance the discipline
Communicating as a single voice where appropriate
Networking with colleagues who share similar opportunities and challenges

The membership will be comprised of informatics professionals responsible for the leadership and excellence of informatics training programs. The Academic Forum will engage in issues relating to the organization and management of educational and research programs in universities and colleges. It will focus on a range of issues important to faculty such as management, promotion criteria, recruitment, models of success in building informatics programs, salary scales, advocacy within academic environments, and other topics.

The inaugural meeting of AMIA's Academic Forum will be chaired by Mark Musen of Stanford University. A planning committee has developed a solid program. The meeting will take place on Monday, June 25, 2007 in Palo Alto, California. Academic informatics units that join the Academic Forum in 2007 become Charter Members and have the opportunity to define the services and benefits that the Academic Forum will provide to members. A single individual will represent each academic unit based on emerging membership criteria. AMIA will support the initial administration of the Academic Forum with a dedicated professional staff member and other resources with the expectation that the Forum will be self-sustaining.

Mission

The mission of the AMIA Academic Forum is to promote the development of biomedical and health informatics as an academic discipline. The Forum provides a vehicle for surveying and analyzing activities in academic units dedicated to biomedical and health informatics and for recommending best practices related to education, scholarship, faculty development, and faculty retention. The Forum provides a locus for discussion of national research initiatives in informatics and a round table that facilitates collaboration among different academic units to further their objectives for education and research.

Vision

The Academic Forum is a unit of AMIA that works closely with the Academic Strategic Leadership Council to provide guidance, support, and advocacy for academic programs in biomedical and health informatics in the United States.

Academic units in biomedical and health informatics currently exist in many forms. There are major differences with respect to:

Scope: Some limit themselves to informatics as applied to specific aspects of health or health care, whereas some include the entire spectrum of biomedicine; some emphasize foundational principles, and some emphasize more pragmatic work;
Service role: Some provide some level of IT and informatics services to their institution, whereas others are restricted to educational and laboratory-based research activities;
Composition: Some draw on faculty members from a variety of primary departments, whereas others have a core group of faculty members who identify primarily with the informatics unit;
Administrative placement: Some informatics units have durability as departments or centers, whereas others face uncertain organizational and budgetary futures.

Academicians in biomedical and health informatics similarly are a diverse group, with differences in their formal training, scholarly activities, and expectations for teaching, for supervision of trainees, for independent research, and for clinical and institutional service.

It is believed that there is wide variation in requirements for appointment and promotion of faculty, in faculty compensation, and in institutional support for scholarship. The product of academic work in informatics is often believed to be highly dependent on particular institutional idiosyncrasies, rather than on articulated policies and goals of the academic units or on recognized professional standards.

As biomedical and health informatics becomes an entrenched component of the educational mission of academic medical centers and universities, and as informatics becomes a core component of new federal initiatives in biomedical research, it will become increasingly important for academic units in biomedical and health informatics to articulate standards and policies for education and scholarship. At the same time, the larger organizations in which these units are embedded will need to develop an enhanced understanding of the nature of academic work in informatics, and of the support that these units and their associated faculty members require to be successful.

Goals

The Forum will provide leadership to promote biomedical and health informatics as an academic discipline.
The Forum will provide guidance to academic institutions in their efforts to develop and sustain educational and scholarly activities in biomedical and health informatics.>
The Forum will identify and communicate to participating academic units information on new research initiatives, opportunities for professional development, conferences and workshops, and other relevant academic activities.