Given the rapid expansion of the FDA’s knowledge base and the growing importance of information technology in healthcare, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has been tasked with providing employee enrichment in the field of HIT. Through an academic alliance with Duke University, the purpose for the Health Informatics Short Course is to provide FDA employees with the tools needed to convert regulatory science data into actionable intelligence. Employees’ dependence on health care information and the amount of available information grows every day. To meet the demands to use this information, informaticians are making advances that enable us to better use information to improve human health. To effectively understand the challenges of using and how to deal with this information, data mining and text mining are critical for those responsible in implementing an informatics platform.