10x10 (“Ten by Ten”) Course: New Name and Milestones

Although I consider artificial intelligence (AI) to be part of biomedical informatics, there is no question that AI has become very important on its own, in and beyond biomedicine and health. This is certainly reflected in the introductory course I teach to graduate, continuing education, and medical students. Not only one of ten units in the course devoted to AI, but AI is increasingly infused across other units, such as information retrieval and clinical research informatics.

To this end, I am changing the name of course, which will now be called, Introduction to Biomedical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. The course content will not change substantially because AI is already part of the course. Thus, topics like electronic health records, data standards and interoperability, health information exchange, privacy and security, telehealth, information retrieval, clinical research, and more will remain, perhaps with their connections to AI more prominent.

The 10x10 course hit another milestone recently, which is its 20th year of being offered. Since 2005, over 3300 people have completed the 10x10 course. The graduate student version of the course has been around even longer, dating back to 1994, and has been completed by over 1700 students, not only those in our graduate program but also students in other programs such as public health, nursing, and basic biomedical sciences, who take the course as an elective.

The ten units of the course cover the following topics:

1. Overview of Fields and Problems Motivating Them
2. Computing Concepts for Biomedical Informatics
3. Electronic and Personal Health Records (EHR, PHR)
4. Standards and Interoperability
5. Artificial Intelligence
6. Advanced Use of the EHR
7. EHR Implementation, Security, and Evaluation
8. Information Retrieval (Search)
9. Research Informatics
10. Other Areas of Informatics