The Minnesota Health Informatics Training Progams in the USA involve faculty and students at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester Minnesota. The program faculty have different research interests including clinical, public health & bio-informatics; modeling & simulation; signal & image processing; and telemedicine. There are collaborations with departments, centers and institutes at the University and its Academic Health Center; affiliations with Fairview Health Systems, the Veterans Administration Hospital and the Minnesota Department of Health; as well as exchanges with the International Partnership for Health Informatics Education (IPHIE). Over a thirty-year period, the research and educational emphases in informatics have shifted to reflect faculty interests and patterns of research funding.

Supported in part by training grants from the US National Library of Medicine at NIH, over the past three decades the Minnesota training programs have evolved from the preparation of teachers and consultants in biostatistics and biomathematics, to cross-training of health professionals and research scientists in applied informatics and genomics. Programmatic emphases for research depended upon faculty consultation, collaborative grants and new initiatives from federal, state and local agencies and institutions. In the early years, funding for research in clinical informatics was received from the University Hospital for consultation and management as laboratory and other clinical information systems were developed; and for research information systems to help support their General Clinical Research Center and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Modeling, simulation and evaluation pipelines for depiction and analysis of disease patterns were developed as part of the National Micropopulation Simulation Resource. More recently, funding for community registries and infectious disease surveillance from the US Centers for Disease Control to the Minnesota Department of Health, and for outreach/consumer informatics via Telemedicine and Telehomecare grants to Fairview Medical Systems, have resulted in unions of clinical, consumer and community informatics which forecast tomorrow's integrated healthcare information systems.

This presentation is courtesy of the IPHIE exchange program, the US/NIH National Library of Medicine Training Programs, the University of Minnesota Medical School, and the Minnesota Department of Health.