Health Informatics Education in Brazil Heimar F Marin a , Eduardo Massad b , Eduardo P Marques c , Raymundo S Azevedo b , Lucila Ohno-Machado d a Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazilian Health Informatics Society, Brazil b School of Medicine, LIM01 HCFMUSP, The University of Sao Paulo, Brazil c State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil d Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard/MIT, USA Abstract Technology changed not only the practice of healthcare but also professional training and educational models. Developing countries, such as Brazil, are increasingly pre- senting a high demand for health informatics specialists. Training of professionals in this field is still expensive, and there is a limited supply of high-quality teaching re- sources. We reviewed the education programs evolution since when health informatics were initiated in Brazil. We describe the main experiences, including the Brazil-USA training program. We also discuss lessons learned during the implementation of this initiative that are driving the design of a new certificate program. Keywords: Medical Informatics; Education; History 1. Introduction Today’s technology causes significant modification of human activities and, consequently, of the way we learn and work. Traditional methods of teaching, managing, and practicing no longer support the requirements of modern life. In 2000, the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) published the Recom- mendations on Education in Health and Medical Informatics (available at http://www.imia.org). Among several important aspects, the document states that “Health and medical informatics is of particular importance for the following reasons: (a) a progress in information processing and information and communication technology is changing our so- cieties; (b) the amount of health and medical knowledge is increasing at such a rate that we cannot hope to keep up with it, or store, organize, and retrieve existing and new knowledge in a timely way without using a new information processing methodology;(c) healthcare profes- sionals who are well-educated in health or medical informatics are needed to systematically process information in medicine and in healthcare, and for the appropriate and responsible application of information and communication technology.” In the past few years the field of health informatics has experienced extraordinary growth. Increasing awareness of the need for trained personnel has led to the development of several training programs in different continents. As with any new field, highly qualified faculty tends to concentrate in a few centers of excellence. Consequently, establishing formal programs to provide broad training and education is currently an enormous challenge. Connecting Medical Informatics and Bio-Informatics R. Engelbrecht et al. (Eds.) ENMI, 2005 1126 Section 4: Educational Technologies and Methodologies