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

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 titles were characterized as analyst (21%, n=65). More than one-third of the hiring organizations for these jobs were health systems (35%, n=106). Almost 100% (n=291) of the jobs were fulltime. Nearly half of the jobs were based in New York (47%, n=143). Data/statistical analysis (68%, n=207), working in multidisciplinary teams (35%, n=108), and biomedical/clinical experience (30%, n=93) were common skills needed. Structured query language (SQL), Python, and R language were common programming language skills. The proposed framework guides development of a 39-credit fully online population health informatics curriculum in a rapidly changing technological environment