Course Descriptions

This course introduces biomedical and health informatics. It covers the fundamentals of informatics as it applies to healthcare and research, as well as the expanding role of information technology for the delivery of healthcare. The course underscores the application of these systems to the practice of medicine, to enhance health outcomes, improve patient care, and strengthen the clinician-patient relationship. The course also emphasizes the clinical informatics content, which includes fundamentals of clinical and biomedical informatics, clinical decision making and process improvement, health information systems, ethics, and management. 

This course covers the basic concepts surrounding clinical information systems as they apply to healthcare. The focus of the course will be on the socio-technical challenges specific to the selection and implementation of these systems, human factors, evidence-based medicine, information retrieval, and clinical research informatics. Additional topics include a survey of other areas of informatics including telemedicine, imaging informatics, nursing informatics, bioinformatics, public health informatics, and consumer health informatics. 

This course introduces the foundations of computer science for healthcare professionals How to solve problems in the healthcare environment by writing computer programs. How and why computer programs work, with examples in the Python programming language. No prior computer programming experience is expected or required. 

This course focuses on decision support systems that aim to improve healthcare, with an emphasis on clinical decision support (CDS). Through interactive web-based simulators, students will gain familiarity with the following: Common decision support tools used in electronic medical records, decision science and logic as used in CDS, examples of decision tools used at the individual, cohort, and population levels and sharable CDS artifacts using FHIR standards. Common governance, regulatory, legal considerations, and best practices for CDS implementation and evaluation will be discussed. Upon successful completion of this course, students will have the skills to contribute towards designing, implementing, governing, and evaluating decision support systems to improve healthcare.