Developing the Digital Healthcare Workforce in Italy: The SIBIM Experience

The digital healthcare workforce is usually composed of two major types of professionals: the healthcare workers, who are the users of eHealth, and the health informatics developers, who are usually computer scientists, biomedical engineers, or other technical experts. Health informatics educators have the responsibility to develop the appropriate skills for both, acting within their specific curricula. Here we present the experience of the Italian Society of Biomedical Informatics (SIBIM) and show that, whereas the technical curricula are widely covered with a large range of topics, the eHealth education in medical curricula is often limited to simple bioengineering and informatics skills, thus suggesting that eHealth associations and organizations at the national level should focus their efforts towards increasing the level of eHealth contents in medical schools.