Biomedical and health informatics teaching in Portugal: Current status

The domain of Biomedical and Health Informatics (BMHI) lies in the intersection of multiple disciplines, making it difficult to define and, consequently, characterise the workforce, training needs and requirements in this domain. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there isn’t any aggregated information about the higher education programmes in BMHI currently being delivered in Portugal, and which knowledge, skills, and competencies these programmes aim to develop. Our aim is to map BMHI teaching in Portugal. More specifically, our objective is to identify and characterise the: a.) programmes delivering relevant BMHI teaching; b.) geographical distribution and chronological evolution of such programmes; and c.) credit distribution and weight. We conducted a descriptive, cross-sectional study to systematically identify all programmes currently delivering any core BMHI modules in Portugal. Our population included all graduate-level programmes being delivered in the 2021/2022 academic year in any Portuguese higher education institution. We identified 23 programmes delivering relevant teaching in BMHI in Portugal. Of these, eight (35%) were classified as dedicated educational programmes in BMHI, mostly delivered in polytechnic institutes at a master’s level (5; 63%) and located preferentially in the northern part of the country (7). Currently, there are four programmes with potential for accreditation but still requiring some workload increase in certain areas in order to be eligible.