Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Free Course in Healthcare Data Analytics Offered by OHSU

I am pleased to announce that the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is offering a free continuing education course, Update in Health Information Technology: Healthcare Data Analytics, to physicians, nurses, other healthcare professionals, and health informatics/IT professionals. Registration is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/onc-course.

This course is made freely available via a grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) that I described in a previous posting last year. The grant requires us to have 1000 individuals complete the course by June 2017. The full updated ONC Health IT curriculum will also be made freely available in 2017.

Although the course is open to all healthcare professionals and health informatics/IT professionals, physicians will additionally be able to obtain continuing medical education (CME) credit through OHSU. For physicians certified in the new Clinical Informatics Subspecialty, Lifelong Learning and Self-Assessment (LLSA) credits towards American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM) Maintenance of Certification Part II (MOC-II) requirements for the subspecialty are also available.

The course consists of 14 modules that are estimated to take about 18 hours to complete. The course is completely online, and consists of lectures and self-assessment quizzes. References to further information are also provided. Those completing the entire course (viewing all of the lectures and completing the self-assessment quizzes) and evaluation form will receive a Certificate of Completion from OHSU. Physicians will be able to claim 18 credits of CME or (for those certified in Clinical Informatics) MOC-II. (We are not able to offer OHSU academic credit for the course.)

The course will be offered 6 times in overlapping two-month blocks starting in October 2016. Because of the anticipated large enrollment, the entire course will need to be completed during one block in order to receive the Certificate of Completion and CME/MOC-II credit. If the course is not completed during the block, participants can re-enroll in a later block. The course will only be offered for free through May 2017.

The first step in taking the course is registering at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/onc-course. Each participant will be asked to provide some basic information, including name, employer, and email address. (All data will be kept confidential by OHSU, with the exception of confidential reporting to ONC.) After registration, participants will be sent login information to OHSU's Sakai Learning Management System. After completing all of the modules and the self-assessment quizzes, each participant will need to complete the evaluation form. He or she will then be sent via email a PDF Certificate of Completion. (Physicians will additionally be sent certifications for CME or MOC-II credit after completing additional evaluation information.)

Within the Sakai system, each module will provide an overview of learning objectives, one or more lecture segments (in MP4 format, viewable on both computers and mobile devices), optional additional materials, and a self-assessment quiz of 5-10 multiple-choice questions. (Those seeking CME or MOC-II credit must achieve a correct rate of 70% to pass; each quiz will be able to be taken up to 5 times.) Sakai will also provide an interactive forum for those having questions or comments about the materials. Due to the anticipated large enrollment, we will encourage participants to interact and answer questions among themselves, with OHSU teaching assistants bringing in course faculty as needed.

The 14 modules of the course include the following:

  • General Health Care Data Analytics
  • Extracting and Working with Data
  • Population Health and the Application of Health IT
  • Applying Health IT to Improve Population Health at the Community Level
  • Identifying Risk and Segmenting Populations: Predictive Analytics for Population Health
  • Big Data, Interoperability, and Analytics for Population Health
  • Data Analytics in Clinical Settings
  • Risk Adjustment and Predictive Modeling
  • Overview of Interoperable Health IT
  • Standards for Interoperable Health IT
  • Implementing Health Interoperability
  • Ensuring the Security and Privacy of Information Shared
  • Secondary Use of Clinical Data
  • Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

The OHSU course faculty include:

  • William Hersh, MD, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology
  • Vishnu Mohan, MD, MBI, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology
  • David Dorr, MD, MS, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology
  • Peter Graven, PhD, Department of Emergency Medicine
  • Karen Eden, PhD, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology

The MOC-II credit is important for the new subspecialty, with those who are board-certified needing to obtain a certain amount to re-certify in 10 years. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has already developed MOC-II activities, largely through its meetings, but will also have online offerings as it implements its learning management system. They will also offer MOC-IV credits in the future.

3 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for sharing this. Excited to join the cohort

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  2. Thanks for this course. How can I know more as to how does taking this course help physicians? When will another session if free online course be offered? Does one need to keep taking refresher courses after this one?

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    1. This course should be of all value to all who want to learn more about the use of data analytics in healthcare, including physicians. The course will be offered again starting in October, although it will not be for free since the ONC grant has ended. For more information, visit the course Web site at:
      https://dmice.ohsu.edu/onc-course/

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