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Gateway to Health Informatics (G2HI)
 

Course Learning Objectives for each unit
 

Unit 1.    Overview of Field and Problems Motivating It

  • Define biomedical and health informatics, the terms related to it, and its role in health, healthcare, public health, and biomedical research.

  • Discuss the major problems in healthcare motivating use of biomedical and health informatics.

  • Compare and contrast the roles of various individuals in the health information technology workforce.

  • Describe and find the major sources of electronic and print information for biomedical informatics in the scientific literature and on the World Wide Web.

 

Unit 2.    Biomedical Computing

  • Identify the basic tenets of biomedical computing to be able to inform optimal selection of hardware, software, and network connections for a given health or biomedical setting.
  • Describe the major aspects of software engineering as they relate to biomedical and  health informatics.
  • Be able to specify a use case for a biomedical and health informatics functionality.

Unit 3.    Electronic and Personal Health Records (EHR and PHR)

  • List the major categories of clinical data along with their content and structure.

  • Identify the essential functions of the electronic health record (EHR)

  • Describe the major barriers to EHR use.

  • Define the personal health record (PHR) and describe its usage, content, and value

  • Understand the major issues and systems in nursing informatics.

 

Unit 4.    Standards and Interoperability; Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security

  • Explain the importance of standards and interoperability for health and biomedical data

  • Understand the major issues related to identifier standards, including the debate on patient identifiers

  • Describe the various message exchange standards, their explicit roles, and the type of data they exchange

  • Discuss the different terminology systems used in biomedicine and their origins, content, and limitations

  • Understand the techniques and limitations of natural language processing

  • Differentiate the definitions of privacy, confidentiality, and security

  • Describe the elements of HIPAA and other privacy and security issues in health care

 

Unit 5.    Meaningful Use of the EHR

  • Understand the major threats to patient safety and causes of medical error

  • Explain the basic principles of healthcare quality and how the EHR enables them

  • Distinguish the different types of clinical decision support and describe their use and limitations in clinical practice

  • Explain the process of computerized provider order entry and challenges to its use.

  • Understand the goals of health information exchange and how they are carried out

  • Apply the meaningful use criteria under the HITECH/ARRA legislation

 

Unit 6.    EHR Implementation and Evaluation

  • Understand the analysis of workflow for EHR implementation

  • Describe the major steps and challenges in EHR implementation

  • Discuss the results of the major studies on use, outcomes, and cost-benefit of the EHR

  • Discuss the role of EHR and other clinical data in clinical and translational research

  • Describe the ways that biomedical informatics enables public health practice

 

Unit 7.    Evidence-Based Medicine

  • Define the key tenets of evidence-based medicine (EBM) and comparative effectiveness research (CER).

  • Construct answerable clinical questions and critically appraise evidence answering them.

  • Apply the key statistics of EBM for intervention studies, including discerning relative and absolute risk.

  • Understand the critical appraisal of other key clinical questions of diagnosis, harm, and prognosis.

  • Discuss the benefits and limitations to summarizing evidence.

  • Describe how to implement EBM in clinical settings and its limitations.

 

Unit 8.    Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries

  • Enumerate the basic health and biomedical knowledge resources in books, journals, electronic databases, and other sources.

  • Describe the major approaches used to indexing knowledge-based content.

  • Apply advanced searching techniques to the major health and biomedical knowledge resources.

  • Discuss the major results of information retrieval evaluation studies.

  • Define the structure and content of digital libraries and the major issues facing them.

 

Unit 9.    Imaging Informatics and Telemedicine

  • Describe the management of images in clinical settings, including the use of PACS systems.

  • Understand the different modalities of imaging and their capture and use in digital form.

  • Classify the different types of telemedicine and discuss their uses.

  • Describe the efficacy of telemedicine as shown in clinical studies.

  • Discuss the different approaches to patient-clinician communications.

 

Unit 10.    Translational Bioinformatics and Personalized Medicine

  • Define all aspects of bioinformatics and distinguish its work from other areas of biomedical and health informatics.

  • Understand the role of genetics and genomics in biology and medicine.

  • Discuss the major techniques of bioinformatics, including emerging approaches in gene expression, gene variation, and their association with the phenotype.

  • Describe the concept of personalized medicine and how it is enabled by biomedical and health informatics.

  • Access the major bioinformatics data resources and demonstrate their use.

 

Unit 11.    Organizational and Management Issues in Informatics

  • Understand the role of organizational behavior and other issues in implementing health IT systems.

  • Be able to apply the principles of change management in leading implementation of health IT interventions.