Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine • Nashville, TN • Online with live classes • $1,935/Credit
Vanderbilt University offers an MS in Clinical Informatics program.
Program Overview
| Program | Est. Tuition | Est. Duration | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| MS in Applied Clinical Informatics (MS-ACI) | $69.7K | 1.75 years (5 semesters) | 36 |
Vanderbilt’s MS-ACI is a CAHIIM-accredited master’s with no travel at all, built around a fixed Thursday-evening class block. Unlike the Duke, Stanford, and Penn programs on this site, nothing requires a trip to campus. The catch is the shape: 28 of 36 credits and 78% of tuition land in the first 12 months, followed by a nine-month capstone run inside your own employer.
Quick Facts
| Feature | Details |
|---|---|
| Program Types | MS in Applied Clinical Informatics (MS-ACI) |
| Format | Online with live classes: weekly live Thursday 5-8 p.m. CT sessions plus virtual orientations each term |
| Practicum Hours | 240 hours across four semesters (1 credit each) |
| Practicum Placement | VUMC, your home institution, or another clinical site |
| RN License Required | No; open to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, allied health, and health IT professionals |
| Who It’s For | Working clinicians and health IT staff with an employer willing to sponsor a capstone |
| Distinctive Coursework | Clinical decision support, clinical data standards, human-centered design, system lifecycle, organizational change |
| Certification Pathway | AMIA AHIC Track 1 degree; work experience still required. Not an ABPM board pathway. |
| Tuition | $69,662 for 2026-27 (block billing year 1, hourly year 2) |
| Accreditation | CAHIIM (health informatics, master’s); SACSCOC institutional |
| Start Term | Fall only; priority deadline February 15, final deadline May 15 |
| Enrollment Restrictions | F and J student visa holders ineligible |
MS in Applied Clinical Informatics (MS-ACI)
The estimated tuition for the MS in Applied Clinical Informatics at Vanderbilt University is approximately $69,662 (36 credits at about $1,935/credit, derived from 2026-27 term billing).
The program can generally be completed in about 21 months, from August of year one to May of year two.
MS Curriculum
The curriculum is fixed and cohort-based, with no electives in the core sequence. Year one carries all 24 didactic credits across three full-time terms. Year two drops to 4 credits per term, almost entirely capstone and practicum. Content tracks the published core content for the physician clinical informatics subspecialty, so it leans toward decision support, standards, and implementation rather than programming or statistics.
- ACI 6110 Introduction to Clinical Informatics (3)
- ACI 6111 Foundations of Health Information Technology (3)
- ACI 6112 The Health System (3)
- ACI 6120 Clinical Decision Support and Evidence-Based Patient Care (3)
- ACI 6121 Clinical Information Systems and Applications (3)
- ACI 6122 Workflow, Human-Centered Design, and Implementation (3)
- ACI 6130 Data to Knowledge (Clinical Data Standards) (2)
- ACI 6131 Clinical Information System Lifecycle (2)
- ACI 6132 Management and Organizational Change (2)
- ACI 7111/7121/7211/7221 Capstone Project Planning and Evaluation (8 credits total)
More curriculum details are available here.
You Should Know
- Term loads run 11, 11, 6, 4, and 4 credits. The first fall and spring are heavy for anyone working full time.
- Live sessions run Thursday 5-8 p.m. Central regardless of your time zone, one hour per didactic course.
- No computer science background is required, but the program encourages an introductory programming course before entry if you have none.
- Transfer credit is capped at 6 credits and granted at the program director’s discretion.
MS Practicum and Capstone
- Practicum: 240 hours over four semesters, 1 credit each (ACI 7110, 7120, 7210, 7220), or about 60 hours per semester.
- Students embed in an interdisciplinary team tackling a live informatics problem, attending team meetings and joining analysis, planning, and implementation.
- Sites: VUMC, the student’s home institution, or another clinical site. Who arranges the site is not clearly stated.
- Capstone: a workplace-based project in the final nine months, with planning courses starting in the first fall.
- The capstone must be approved by both Vanderbilt and the sponsor organization, and reports to a sponsor-side project executive and at least one Vanderbilt faculty mentor.
- Students lead a team to plan, implement, and evaluate the initiative, then submit a final report.
Sixty hours per semester works out to roughly 4 hours per week over a 15-week term (our estimate). That load is light, but it stacks on top of an 11-credit first fall and spring. The capstone is the real gate: it assumes you hold a job at a healthcare organization that will sponsor a project, assign a project executive, and give you room to lead it. Career changers without that access should confirm a workable path before applying.
You Should Know
- The program also requires two one-hour live practicum update sessions in fall and spring.
- VUMC is listed as a practicum site option, which may help students outside a large health system, but no placement guarantee is published.
MS Admissions
Admission is open to any degree holder, with no RN license or clinical credential required.
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree.
- Two years of relevant post-undergraduate experience strongly preferred, not required.
- RN license: not required. Clinical experience: not required.
- GRE, MCAT, or equivalent scores strongly recommended but not required, per the catalog. The admissions page lists scores among required materials.
- Statement of purpose, CV, three professional letters, and three short essays.
- Shortlisted applicants are invited to a phone interview.
- TOEFL score of 600 for non-native English speakers, waived with a U.S. master’s degree.
- Fall start only. Application cycle opens August 1; priority deadline February 15; final deadline May 15.
- International students may enroll, but F and J visa holders cannot participate in person, and live sessions follow Central time.
Tuition
Vanderbilt publishes a $1,935 per-credit rate for part-time MS-ACI enrollment. Degree students are billed by term instead, and the full program works out to about $1,935 per credit (derived).
| Term | Credits | Billing | 2026-27 Tuition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 Fall | 11 | Block | $18,060 |
| Year 1 Spring | 11 | Block | $18,060 |
| Year 1 Summer | 6 | Block | $18,060 |
| Year 2 Fall | 4 | Part-time | $7,741 |
| Year 2 Spring | 4 | Part-time | $7,741 |
| Total | 36 | $69,662 |
- Tuition: $54,180 in year one and $15,482 in year two, per the 2026-27 Student Accounts schedule.
- Student services fee: $71 fall, $71 spring, $70 summer.
- Student health fee: $134 fall, $134 spring, $132 summer.
- One-time transcript fee: $100.
- Estimated tuition plus required fees: about $70,784 (our calculation).
Be aware that:
- Tuition is unchanged from 2025-26. Both years’ cost pages and the bursar list the same $54,180 and $15,482 figures.
- Block billing means year one costs the same whatever the load. The 6-credit summer term costs about $3,010 per credit, versus about $1,642 per credit in fall and spring (our calculation).
- The program cost page footnotes still list $69 and $130 per-term fees. The bursar’s $71 and $134 rates are newer and used here.
- The cost of attendance budgets $331 per month for health insurance. Whether online MS-ACI students are auto-enrolled in Vanderbilt’s plan is not clearly stated.
- Vanderbilt and VUMC employees receive a waiver for the services and health fees only, not tuition.
For most students the bill is tuition plus about $1,100 in fees. Housing and food lines in the official cost of attendance assume Nashville living and do not apply to remote students already paying their own living costs. Plan cash flow around year one, which carries nearly four-fifths of the tuition.
Why Choose This Clinical Informatics Program?
This program fits clinicians and health IT staff who want an accredited master’s without travel and who plan to grow into an informatics role at their current employer.
Career-entry fit. The design rewards people already inside a health system. Both the practicum and the capstone can run at your own workplace, so the degree doubles as a visible informatics project for your employer. Published outcomes for 2024-25 show 100% graduation, 100% employment one year out, and 92% retention, though the cohort size is not published.
Who should look elsewhere. Applicants with no healthcare employer face an unclear capstone path. Anyone who cannot hold Thursday evenings Central time for a year should pass, as should those wanting programming or data science depth. Physicians seeking ABPM board eligibility need an ACGME fellowship, which this degree does not replace.
Cost trade-off. At about $69.7K, the price buys CAHIIM accreditation and zero travel. Front-loaded billing means the first year is the financial and time crunch; year two is light on both.
Accreditation
The MS-ACI is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM) as a health informatics master’s program. Vanderbilt announced the accreditation in January 2025, and the program states it runs through 2031. The program appears in CAHIIM’s program directory.
Vanderbilt University is institutionally accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC).
The degree is a Track 1 qualifying degree for the AMIA Health Informatics Certification. AHIC still requires 4 years of qualifying informatics work in the past 6 years at 50% or more of work time, or 6 of 8 years at 20-49%. The degree alone does not make a graduate exam-eligible. For physicians, ABPM Clinical Informatics board certification has required a 24-month ACGME fellowship since 2023; the program’s own FAQ confirms this.
Weighing Other Clinical Informatics Programs
See every profiled program in the clinical informatics schools directory, or start with the clinical informatics degree guide.