Developing Evidence-based Population Health Informatics curriculum: Integrating competency based model and job analysis.

Abstract

With the rapid pace of technological advancements, public health professions require a core set of informatics skills. The objective of the study is to integrate informatics competencies and job analysis to guide development of an evidence-based curriculum framework and apply it towards creation of a population health informatics program. We conducted content analysis of the Population Health Informatics related job postings in the state of New York between June and July 2019 using the Indeed job board. The search terms included "health informatics" and "population health informatics." The initial search yielded 496 job postings. After removal of duplicates, inactive postings and that did not include details of the positions' responsibilities resulted in 306 jobs. Information recorded from the publicly available job postings included job categories, type of hiring organization, educational degree preferred and required, work experience preferred and required, salary information, job type, job location, associated knowledge, skills and expertise and software skills. Most common job title was that of an analyst (21%, n=65) while more than one-third of the hiring organizations were health systems (35%, n=106). 95% (n=291) of the jobs were fulltime and nearly half of these jobs were in New York City (47%, n=143). Data/statistical analysis (68%, n=207), working in multidisciplinary teams (35%, n=108), and biomedical/clinical experience (30%, n=93) were the common skills needed. Structured query language (SQL), Python, and R language were common programming language skills. A broad framework of integrating informatics competencies, combined with analysis of the skills the jobs needed, and knowledge acquisition based on global health informatics projects guided the development of an online population health informatics curriculum in a rapidly changing technological environment.