Building for the future: The creation of a residency training track to foster innovation through clinical informatics in psychiatry

Abstract

Early clinical informatics (CI) education provides an introduction to CI methodologies for resident physicians to apply within their boarded specialties. A specialty notably absent from the effort to train residents in CI is psychiatry. We present a novel means of integrating CI exposure into a structured educational track within a psychiatry residency training program. The clinical informatics track at the University of North Carolina Department of Psychiatry is a 3-year, longitudinal experience open to residents starting in postgraduate year 2. To our knowledge, this is the first track of its kind within a psychiatry residency training program.