Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program

Welcome to the Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program at the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHealth) at Houston, Memorial Hermann Hospital System – Texas Medical Center and the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. The program is based in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. Our program mission is to develop leaders who will advance the science and practice of clinical informatics. This mission aligns well with the University mission “…to educate health science professionals, discover and translate advances in the biomedical and social sciences, and model the best practices in clinical care and public health.”

Our program aims are:

  1. To adapt and extend our existing educational environment to fellowship training that ensures that trainees acquire fundamental and applied informatics knowledge and skills.
  2. To offer trainees the opportunity to experience the development, analysis, optimization, and innovation of clinical information systems and users
  3. To enable lifelong learning, scholarship, innovation, and leadership in applied informatics in the context of a sustainable and successful career trajectory and
  4. To leverage informatics science to improve clinical practice at the Texas Medical Center and beyond.

The Texas Medical Center (TMC) is the largest concentration of biomedical activity in the world. Collectively, the TMC is the largest employer in Houston and the 8th largest business district in the United States. The TMC includes 50 institutions, including 21 hospitals and two specialty institutions, two medical schools, six nursing schools, and schools of dentistry, public health, and pharmacy. TMC institutions collectively have over 106,000 employees, 9,200 total inpatient beds, and host 10 million patient encounters, >180,000 surgical procedures, and 750,000 ER visits per year.

The Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC) is a partnership of seven TMC institutions: Baylor College of Medicine, Texas A&M University, the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Rice, the UT Medical Branch at Galveston, the University of Houston and UTHealth Houston. One of the benefits of the GCC partnership is that fellows will have access to faculty, courses, and seminars at the member institutions.

Fellows will have access to the TMC Library, a joint effort with other TMC institutions – the TMC Library is one of the nation’s leading medical libraries with extensive physical and electronic resources. As of 2022, the library collections include 164 databases, over 70,000 e-journals, and over 370,000 e-books.

Though based at UTHealth Houston (Epic), fellows also train at the Memorial Hermann Hospital System-TMC (Cerner) and MD Anderson Cancer Center (Epic). Thus, fellows are exposed to different electronic health records (EHRs) implemented at very different institutions: an academic health science center, a large urban non-profit hospital system and a leading academic cancer center.

Administrative leadership of the program will be provided by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Department of Internal Medicine (McGovern Medical School). The department has a long history of quality medical education, including an internal medicine residency and multiple fellowships. Multiple physicians in the department are board certified/eligible in clinical informatics and clinical informatics leaders at UTHealth. The didactic component of this program is provided by the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics.