Pathology Informatics Training Resources

These ten informatics slide sets and term lists are provided free to the Association for Pathology Informatics (API) by Dr. James H. Harrison, Jr., MD, PhD, Professor and Director of Laboratory Informatics, Department of Pathology, University of Virginia. The slides are intended primarily for use by instructors in presenting informatics lectures in pathology residency programs. The slides, and especially the term lists, may also be useful for personal study but they are not designed as a stand-alone tutorial. They are released with a CC-BY 4.0 license: they may be edited for local use and the edited versions may be shared with attribution or contributed back to this primary API distribution as improvements. The goal of this material is to support pathology training programs by providing foundational knowledge in informatics important to learn and practice anatomic and clinical pathology effectively. The API has not paid for this material nor will the API receive compensation for providing it. The API is merely housing the material on its website for the benefit of members.

Each of the ten topic areas includes a slide set and defined term list that go together. The overall learning objectives are presented in the overview slide set (set “0”). Overall usage notes are repeated in the notes for the title slide for each set. Limited topic-specific usage notes are contained in the notes for the Agenda slide for each set and in individual slide notes. A formal instructors guide is not yet available but may be developed in the future. Each slide set contains a Readings slide at the end with a (purposely) limited reading list linked to pertinent freely-downloadable content.

While the original content is licensed as CC-BY 4.0, some of the content is made available with permission or by other licenses allowing free use and redistribution with attribution. Each slide set has a Permitted Uses slide at the end that explains the licensing of the content. Required attributions are contained in the slides presenting the material or on the Permitted Uses slide. In general, use, modification, and redistribution is allowed provided that the attribution links are preserved and the content is not re-purposed (most of this content can be repurposed by using the attribution links to obtain the content from the source and following those attribution licenses as appropriate).

Additional material related to informatics instruction that may be useful to pathology training programs and trainees is available at no cost from the Association of Pathology Chairs on the Pathology Informatics Essentials for Residents (PIER) Web page. The slide sets offered here cover a substantial subset of PIER release 4 topics. The primary differences with the PIER curriculum are that these slide sets are designed for a more compact presentation/rotation and their sequence differs from the PIER topic sequence, this material does not include practical exercises (though those could be added locally), and the readings are more recent than most of the PIER references. The PIER learning objectives and their mapping to ACGME informatics milestones (see “Getting Started” on the PIER Web page) are generally applicable to the corresponding topics in these slide sets.

For questions or to submit content suggestions, please contact [email protected].