Clinical informatics education

Clinical informatics is one of the youngest formal medical specialties - the American Board of Preventive Medicine first certified the field in 2013 - and most medical schools and residency programs still teach it as an elective afterthought, if they teach it at all. Dr. Osterman has spent the past decade treating that as a problem worth solving rather than a fact to accept. The work spans bedside-to-classroom curriculum building at Vanderbilt, individual mentorship of the next cohort of cancer informaticists, national mentoring through ASCO and NCCN trainee programs, and academic coaching for those building Health IT careers.

Founding both programs and writing both curricula. In 2020 Dr. Osterman founded and now directs the two parallel clinical-informatics teaching programs at Vanderbilt: the Clinical Informatics Integrated Science Curriculum for medical students, and the Graduate Medical Education Clinical Informatics Elective Rotation for residents and fellows. He wrote both curricula from scratch and continues to direct both. The ISC embeds informatics across the medical-student timeline rather than carving out a single optional block; the GME rotation gives residents and fellows hands-on EHR configuration, FHIR development, and decision-support project work in a clinical context. Both programs share a single curricular spine, formalized in A Unified Approach to Clinical Informatics Education for Undergraduate and Graduate Medical Education (Mize & Osterman, AMIA Annu Symp Proc, 2022), and now sit inside the broader Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center education strategy described in To Infinity and Beyond! (Russo, McCoy, Mize, Osterman et al., Applied Clinical Informatics, 2025).

The Microsoft Investigator Fellowship (2020). Dr. Osterman was selected as a Microsoft Investigator Fellow in 2020 - a two-year, $200,000 award - for work leveraging Azure-based virtualization to scale CI education across undergraduate and graduate medical training. The fellowship funded the cloud infrastructure that lets learners build and test against realistic clinical data and systems without the licensing and security overhead that usually makes hands-on informatics education impractical.

Selected mentees. Curriculum is one half of the work; individual mentorship is the other. The three trainees below illustrate how the Vanderbilt CI education environment compounds: each came in with research curiosity, was given a real project as the substrate, and turned the work into first-author peer-reviewed output before moving on to the next stage of training.

• Yanwei (Vivian) Li. Joined Dr. Osterman's lab as an undergraduate researcher at Vanderbilt in 2021. Senior developer and first author on the mCODE Genomics Pilot Project at Vanderbilt (Li, Ye, Huang, Wu, Liu, Ahmed & Osterman, JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, 2024) - the first published demonstration of an mCODE-on-Azure pipeline lifting structured genomic data out of Epic into FHIR resources. Earlier middle-author work on the FILTER crowdsourcing platform (Cheng et al., JAMIA Open, 2021) and the associated ASCO 2022 abstract on oncologist participation in survivorship risk modeling. Now in the Columbia University Bioinformatics PhD program.
• Jirong (Jiarong) Ye. Undergraduate researcher in cancer clinical informatics from 2023. Second author alongside Vivian Li on the mCODE Genomics Pilot Project (JCO CCI, 2024) - one of the undergraduates who turned the standard's specification into a working Azure-deployed FHIR pipeline. Now a pre-doctoral student in the Harvard University Bioinformatics MS program.
• Joseph Vento, MD. Hematology-Oncology clinical fellow at Vanderbilt, working with Dr. Osterman since 2021. First author on two papers covering the full arc from infrastructure to clinical application: the NCCN abstract BIO23-019: Precision Oncology - Integrating Structured Genomic Data Into the Electronic Health Record (JNCCN, 2023) on the upstream workflow that brings structured molecular results into the EHR, and Real-world side effects of targeted therapies: High-throughput association studies leveraging the Cancer Genome Atlas (Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2025) on using that structured data to surface previously underrecognized toxicity signals at scale.

National mentoring through ASCO and NCCN. Beyond Vanderbilt, Dr. Osterman is regularly invited to provide ad-hoc mentoring at major oncology meetings - the ASCO Annual Meeting Fellows' Lounge as a Trainee Mentor in 2023, 2024, and 2025; ASCO's Career Conversations Mentoring Sessions; and trainee-focused sessions at NCCN meetings. These are unscaled, high-bandwidth career conversations with the small subset of oncology fellows who are seriously considering an informatics path. The Implementing Innovation ASCO Educational Book chapter (Osterman, Yao & Krzyzanowska, 2023) is the most recent published version of that career-pathway framing.

Coaching for physicians building Health IT careers. Curriculum is the scaled answer; coaching is the individual one. Dr. Osterman runs facultycoaching.com, an academic coaching practice focused on faculty in academic medicine, with a particular focus on physicians building careers in Health IT. The two threads complement each other: the formal curriculum and named-trainee mentorship scale the basics; the coaching practice addresses the specific career inflection points that the curriculum can't.

The through-line: clinical informatics is a discipline that only works if the next generation of physicians can do it fluently. Dr. Osterman's educational work is the pipeline side of that problem - making sure the people who'll build the next decade of cancer informatics, EHR governance, and clinical AI actually exist and are equipped for the work. See also /about/ for the boards and fellowships that inform this work.