Kohane, who is now the chair of biomedical informatics at Harvard, laughs at himself now. “He was thinking about the way the real world works. And I was focusing on book smarts,” he said.

Graduates of medical informatics training programs are now involved in several commercial software research and development efforts, according to Frisse, some of which have no biomedical component.

Dr. Andrew Beck is a Brown University-trained pathologist who did his residency at Stanford University and then stuck around to earn a doctorate in biomedical informatics, which uses computers to ...