Next Frontier for Informatics Education: College Undergraduates

In the upcoming spring academic quarter (April-June, 2018), some faculty and I from our Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) will be pursuing a new frontier of informatics teaching, launching an introductory health informatics course for college undergraduates. The course will be offered in the new joint Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU)-Portland State University (PSU) School of Public Health (SPH). The new school merged previous academic units in public health from OHSU and health studies programs at PSU.

Our goals for the course are to introduce informatics skills and knowledge to undergraduate health-related majors as well as raise awareness about careers and graduate study in biomedical and health informatics.

As noted in the course syllabus, the learning objectives for the course include:

• Introduce students to problems and challenges that health informatics addresses
• Introduce students to the research and practice of health informatics
• Provide all students with basic skills and knowledge in health informatics to apply in their future health-related careers
• Lead students in discussion around ethical and diversity issues in health informatics
• Provide additional direction to those interested in further (i.e., graduate) study in the field

The course will cover the following topics:

1. Overview of Field and Problems That Motivate It
2. Health Data, Information, and Knowledge
3. Electronic Health Records
4. Personal Health Records and Decision Aids
5. Information Retrieval (Search)
6. Bioinformatics
7. Informatics Applications in Public Health
8. Data Science, Analytics, and Visualization
9. Ethical Issues in Health Informatics
10. Careers in Health Informatics

Readers of this blog will likely hear more about this course in the near future!