An overview of the medical informatics curriculum in medical schools.

As medical schools incorporate medical informatics into their curriculum the problems of implementation arise. Because there are no standards regarding a medical informatics curriculum, medical schools are implementing the subjects in various ways. A survey was undertaken to amass an overview of the medical informatics curriculum nationally. Of the responding schools, most have aspects of medical informatics incorporated into current courses and utilize existing faculty. Literature searching, clinical decision-making, and Internet are the basic topics in the current curricula. The trend is for medical informatics to be incorporated throughout all four years of medical school. Barriers are the difficulties in faculty training, and slow implementation.