Assessment of the IMIA educational accreditation process.

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) biomedical informatics educational recommendations of 2010 provided an excellent guide for institutions across the world in updating their curricula or establishing new programs. IMIA subsequently decided to offer an accreditation process, guided by the earlier recommendations, to assess existing educational programs in the field of biomedical informatics. This paper presents an overview and SWOT analysis of the accreditation process based on a two-year trial period at three sites across continents. Because other sites are now requesting similar accreditation visits by IMIA, the lessons learned by the committee that performed the assessments during trial period will provide useful guidance for both IMIA and those educational institutions.