HCM 626 - Introduction to Health Care Informatics

An introduction of the history and foundations of health informatics is necessary to understand the present state and provide perspective to consider the potential for the future. Beginning with the information infrastructure which consists of the processing tools and technologies to support the creation, use, transportation, and storage of information; the concepts including centralized, distributed, and collaborative computers, as well as middleware, cloud computing and mobile computing will be introduced as general concepts. Leading then to an understanding of databases and their management, the concepts of flat files and relational data structures and the query languages needed to access them, establish quality and integrity in the data resources and assure security through the environment.
With Health Reform now a national policy, the entire industry is facing a paradigm shift in the need for both business intelligence and Clinical Decision Support capabilities. This must be tempered with the range of Governance issues that surround the access and use of confidential health information and the legal (State and Federal) and ethical issues surrounding Health Informatics. An understanding of the secondary uses of data, classification systems and unstructured data will broaden the students understanding. And finally the continued expansion of technology, remote monitoring devises and personal health are all contributing to the explosion of data and the importance of information in the population health perspective.
3 credits, No prerequisites.
Lecture
Credits: 3
Offered in the Winter Trimester