Surgical Pathology Program Director
Jonathan Zuckerman, MD, PhD
Phone: (310) 794-1485 | Email
Clinical Informatics Program Director
Douglas Bell, MD, PhD
Email
Pathology Fellowship Coordinator
Heidi Merkin
Phone: (310) 794-7495 | Email
Clinical Informatics Fellowship Coordinator
Kevin Baldwin, MPH, PMP, CPHIMS
Email
Due to the recent rapid expansion of electronic health records systems (EHRs) throughout medical practice that was promoted and accelerated by the HITECH Act of 2009, and the more general advances in data generation and analysis, there is a critical need in clinical medicine to have physicians among all specialties who have deep training in informatics. Pathology and Laboratory Medicine are highly dependent on sophisticated information systems specific to their discipline that must integrate with EHRs.
The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Health are seeking outstanding applicants for a combined two-year fellowship in Pathology and Clinical Informatics (CI) at the University of California, Los Angeles. The program is open to pathologists only.
The fellowship's goal is to develop leaders with expertise in pathology and informatics. The fellowship will provide physicians with experiential training in alignment with the ACGME guidelines. Although the surgical pathology fellowship is a non-ACGME fellowship, it is held to the same standards as an ACGME accredited program. Upon successful completion of the two-year program, fellows will be eligible for board certification in clinical informatics. The program’s educational experiences will consist of informatics rotations, didactic sessions (including courses), an independent research project, and surgical pathology blocks.
The General Surgical Pathology fellows rotate through month-long assignments at a senior or supervisorial level. The year is intended to provide the fellow with that last layer of confidence necessary to practice surgical pathology independently in a variety of settings from community hospitals to large academic institutions. The fellows will rotate 1-3 months in a surgical pathology subspecialty where they are the only trainee on that service and will be responsible for running the service including grossing specimens and preparing all the cases for sign out. For the remainder of the year, the fellows rotate through senior-level rotations. The General Surgical Pathology fellows are also granted one or two months of elective time to pursue additional training in subspecialty areas of interest, including Cytology/FNA, GI Biopsy, Hematology/Lymphoma, or to pursue research, both pathology or CI projects. The Surgical Pathology fellows are responsible for presenting at several multidisciplinary conferences and tumor boards. The schedule and expectations are specified under each specific rotation.
Informatics Rotations consist of 2-3 month assignments to a working unit of the UCLA Health Information Services and Solutions department. This presents a unique opportunity for fellows to work in a health care delivery system that has been named among the nation's "Most Wired" by Hospitals and Health Networks magazine and honored with the HIMSS Analytics Outpatient and Inpatient Stage 7 Awards, representing attainment of the highest level of electronic medical record progress at hospitals and health systems. Most recently, only 1.2 percent of the more than 5,400 U.S. hospitals in the HIMSS Analytics Database have received this recognition. This fellowship program is designed to allow a highly flexible rotation sequence, customized to the fellow's career goals and prior clinical experience.
Didactic activities include seminars delivered by expert faculty covering the core curriculum, journal club and case studies. Fellows also participate in clinical and research conferences and other educational activities.
Informatics didactics include a monthly Clinical Informatics Virtual Case Conference (VCC) webinar that UCLA has organized involving all of the ACGME-accredited clinical informatics fellowship programs. The case conference series reviews core clinical informatics curriculum material that is not covered in other didactics. The fellow also participates in a monthly informatics journal club held in conjunction with UCLA’s Resident Informaticist Program. Additionally, the fellow will complete the following informatics-related didactics:
Finally, the fellow will have the opportunity to audit select courses from the UCLA Master’s Degree in Biomedical Informatics.
Based on personal career objectives and informatics challenges that they identify in rotations, fellows will select a research mentor and a research question to address as their primary research project. Resources of the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute will be available to support fellow projects, providing research access to EHR data and statistical consulting.
The fellowship position is open to applicants who have completed training in a US or Canadian ACGME accredited AP/CP or AP only or CP only residency program. Applicants must be Board
eligible or Board certified. International medical school graduates will only be considered if they have completed their residency training in a US or Canadian ACGME accredited residency program. A California medical license is required on day one of appointment.
To apply, you will be required to upload the following documents to our online application management system, UC-Recruit. You will be responsible for uploading the following documents to UC Recruit:
Please click on the "Apply Now" link to apply for the Combined Surgical Pathology/Clinical Informatics Fellowship.
If you have any further questions, please contact Heidi Merkin for Surgical Pathology specific questions and Kevin Baldwin for Clinical Informatics specific questions.
