What Do They Mean by "Health Informatics"? Health Informations Posts Compared to Program Standards

Abstract

There is a lack of alignment between and within the competencies and skills required by health informatics (HI) related jobs and those present in academic curriculum frameworks. This study uses computational topic modeling for gap analysis of career needs vs. curriculum objectives. The seven AMIA-CAHIIM-accepted core knowledge domains were used to categorize a corpus of HI-related job postings (N = 475) from a major United States-based job posting website. Computational modeling-generated topics were created and then compared and matched to the seven core knowledge domains. The HI-defining core domain, representing the intersection of health, technology and social/behavioral sciences matched only 45.9% of job posting content. Therefore, the authors suggest that bidirectional communication between academia and industry is needed in order to better align educational objectives to the demands of the job market.