Advanced Graduate Certificate Program
Medical/Health Informatics
Program Description
The program is an intensive introduction to the field of Medical/Health Informatics. The focus is on the issues surrounding
the use of information technologies and information management systems
in healthcare and public health settings, as well as the systems required
to help patients understand
and manage health information to maintain health or cope with injury
or disease.
This field is essential to understanding
and promoting the effective organization, analysis, management, use,
and exchange of information in health care, and is closely related
to, but not the same as bioinformatics, which focuses on the
biomedical applications of computer science and statistics.
Medical/Health Informatics is
more broadly concerned with the decision sciences (probability theory, decision
analysis and the psychology of human problem-solving), cognitive science,
information sciences, and the management sciences as they are applied
to managing information in human health care and public health settings.
Major Issues in the Field
- Patient privacy
- Telehealth (preventive, promotive, and curative aspects)
- Development and use of medical ontologies (taxonomies, categories, controlled vocabularies)
- Use of medical data exchange systems
- Practice of evidence-based medicine
- Electronic health records management
For more information about the field of Medical/Health Informatics you may want to explore the websites of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).