Junior Resident

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RAMS Roadmaps-Junior Resident

 

PGY1: Building Foundations

Your first year of residency will be busy. You should prioritize learning the health system and building clinical knowledge. As you navigate through your new role, you can consider the following to explore further in clinical informatics (CI):

  • Seek a Local/Regional Mentor: Identify faculty members within the emergency medicine (EM) department or the hosting institution with informatics background to guide you on your CI journey.
  • Position Yourself as a Digital Guru: Establish yourself as an expert in using your institution's electronic health record (EHR) system and common applications (e.g., amion, dictation, etc.), and help your colleagues troubleshoot common issues and suggest improvements.
  • Join National Committees: If you have not already done so as a medical student, consider joining CI-focused organizations to network with peers and experts. Consider attending CI-specific conferences to get a better idea for the informatics personality, as well as the type of healthcare problems being solved and scholarly work being done.

PGY2: Expanding Your Role

As you refine your clinical acumen, consider the following to expand beyond your typical resident role and venture further into CI:

  • Read: Develop foundational knowledge in key areas such as cybersecurity, clinical decision support (CDS), and interoperability through journals and introductory informatics textbooks.
  • Notice Problems: Reflect on challenges in your daily workflows and consider ways to address these issues through human-centered informatics solutions. Collect these pain points. Think about how processes ought to be done - your fresh perspective may be uniquely valuable. Ask why inefficient processes are done the way they are - you'll find that frequent answers include "it's always been done that way" or "nobody knows," which is a perfect way to...
  • Participate in CI-Related Projects: Engage in quality improvement/patient safety or operational projects that involve informatics tools/IT team. You can also consider working with departmental leaders to develop dashboards, create residency reports, or improve existing analytics tools for clinical and operational metrics.
  • Develop Technical Skills: While not strictly necessary, building technical proficiency in applications, tools and programming languages like SQL, R, or Python to analyze data and contribute meaningfully to projects can be helpful.
  • Work with Epic/Cerner Analysts: Collaborate on EHR optimization projects to address pain points in the daily emergency department workflow.
  • Present at and Attend Conferences: Prepare to share your work at local, regional, or national conferences as a senior resident, as informatics projects often require significant lead time.
  • Take on More Active Committee Roles: Increase your involvement in local, regional, or national committees to build your leadership skills and network with other professionals.