The core curriculum provides training in the fundamental principles of informatics, with examples from across the healthcare continuum. Please note the special registration procedure for online courses at the bottom of the page. The ME course numbers are for students registering through the School of Medicine or School of Nursing. Students enrolled at the Bloomberg School of Public Health should register for these courses through the SPH using the course numbers assigned through the Department of Health Policy and Management www.jhsph.edu/dept/hpm/certificates/informatics/curriculum.html

PLEASE NOTE THE ADD/DROP DATES FOR THE 2012/13 ACADEMIC YEAR.

 

ME 600.903 Introduction to Biomedical and Public Health Informatics

Harold Lehmann, MD, PhD
First Quarter *online
Introduces students to the core principles of informatics as applied to the entire range of health, from prevention, through illness, to population and public health. Focuses on frameworks within which to describe and explain health information systems. Provides to non-clinicians basic exposure to the terminology and concepts of clinical care and public health. Provides to technical novices basic exposure to IT terminology. Provides all students entry-level concepts and skills for later courses in the informatics sequences. Further details at Distance Ed.

ME 600.902 Leading Change Through Health IT (Previously named Planning & Evaluation of Health Information Systems) 

Nancy Roderer, MLS,  Peter Greene MD,
First Quarter *online
Review of health information systems through case studies in the evaluation processes. The course presents a framework for design and evaluation of systems based on user needs, functions performed, related information activities, and available technology. Skills taught include the use of measures and methods for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of information systems, including cost, performance, effectiveness and benefit/outcome determination. Further details at Distance Ed.

ME 600.900 Health Information Systems: Design to Deployment

Robert Miller, MD, 
Third Quarter *online 
A review of health information systems, such as patient record, patient monitoring, imaging, public health, educational, bioinformatics and scholarly systems. This offering teaches the core architectures and technologies of these core systems, focusing on commonalities and differences and design. Further details at Distance Ed. *Prerequisite - 600.903 Introduction to Biomedical and Public Health

ME 600.904 HIT Standards and Systems Interoperability

Anna Orlova, PhD
Third Quarter *online
The purpose of this course is to learn the data, information, and knowledge standards critical to the successful implementation of local, regional, and national health-related information systems. Target competencies are to identify the appropriate level of HITSP standards for an informatics problem, and select the appropriate standard within that level; create use cases and an organizational process to define an interoperability standard for a specific healthcare/regional situation; participate in a national standards-creation process. Further details at Distance Ed. *Prerequisite - 600.903 Introduction to Biomedical and Public Health

ME 600.901 Health Sciences Informatics: Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support

Harold Lehmann, MD PhD 
Fourth Quarter *online
This course provides a framework for understanding decision support in the workflow of the health sciences. The focus is on the types of support needed by different decision makers, and the features associated with those types of support. A variety of decision support algorithms is discussed, examining advantages and disadvantages of each, with a strong emphasis on decision analysis as the basic science of decision making. Students are expected to demonstrate facility with one algorithm in particular through the creation of a working prototype, and to articulate the evidence for efficacy and effectiveness of various types of decision support in health sciences and practice, in general. Further details at Distance Ed. 

Domain Courses

ME 600.905 Clinical Informatics

Chris Lehmann and George Kim
Second Quarter *online
Prerequisites – 2 – 4 years clinical experience or permission of the instructor
Focusing on the information-system life cycle, this course provides students with essential knowledge and skills to plan the specification, development, deployment, and evaluation of clinical systems in a wide variety of contexts, taking account the special needs and characteristics of clinical environments. Sample information systems include Bar Coding, Clinical Decision Support, Computerized Provider Order Entry, Consumer Health, Continuity of Care Record, Electronic Health Records, Electronic Prescribing, Health Information Exchange, Master Patient Index, Mobile, Personal Health Records, Telehealth. Further details at Distance Ed.

ME 600.809 Topics in Clinical Informatics Class

Paul Nagy, PhD

The class provides technical and management training to physicians and IT professionals in building clinical leaders that can leverage information technology to transform healthcare. The students will have interaction with software developers, information technology professionals, and business leaders trying to adapt innovations in information technology into healthcare. Students will learn how to bridge cultural barriers between information technology and the clinical environment to communicate with clinical staff, vendors, and IT professionals to successfully deploy clinical systems.

ME 600.907 Database Querying in Health

Paul Nagy, PhD
Number of credits: 3
Third Quarter - Wednesdays 1/23 - 3/13 2pm - 5pm
Where: 2024 East Monument Street, Ste. 1-200, Rm. 1-207
 
This course introduces students to core concepts of relational databases along with special issues related to databases used in health information systems.
 

ME 600.714 Analysis of Electronic Health Records

 
Quarter 4
3 hours/week meeting time TBA face to face
Instructor: Harold Lehmann

Provides students with the skills to construct queries of EHR systems for research and quality-improvement projects. Topics include linking of identifiers, use of data dictionaries and standards, issues of privacy and security, issues of maintaining semantics, and alternative architectures for operational, data warehousing and data mart systems.

 

NR 210.811.01 Applied Health Informatics

Patti Abbott
Spring Semester
This course is designed to provide the student with the knowledge and skills regarding the design, use and evaluation of information technology to support evidence-based practice. The course content is designed to provide a set of skills necessary to identify, analyze, and evaluate data elements, data interchanges, data structures and workflow that can be used to address pressing problems in health and healthcare. Students will use the skills acquired to identify and analyze areas for improvement in practice that are amenable to the application of information technology, propose an informatics-based approach for addressing the identified gaps, and develop and validate a blueprint for transforming and evaluating the proposal in student defined application area. Students will also examine publicly available health-related databases to gain familiarity with structure, access, manipulation, comparability, benefits, and weaknesses.

PH 221.649. E-Health and M-Health: Using Technology to Improve Health in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Ed Bunker MS, Nkossi Dambita MS, Bill Weiss DrPH
Third Quarter
Explores applications of information technologies (IT) in low and middle-income countries. Examines approaches for developing IT resources to support both public health and clinical care. Focuses on practical approaches to assess the appropriate application of technology to improve health of populations and individuals. Identifies important issues for consideration when developing and deploying electronic systems within an international health context. Through review and analysis of case studies and discussions with practitioners, students gain experience in assessing and articulating requirements for a variety of types of electronic systems, from mobile (i.e., handheld) “point-of-care” systems to support clinical care to national surveillance systems. Covers current topics and issues, including discussions about the challenges of creating and developing systems within a low-bandwidth environment; challenges of long-term sustainability and staffing within often western donor-driven funding mechanisms; interoperability (i.e., the ability of different systems to work together); potential for open source collaboration, thus allowing public health agencies to leverage low or no cost solutions; and potential for building on an electronic “blank slate”; potential for supporting wider health system reform and broader quality improvement through the introduction of appropriate systems.

ME 600.711 Health Informatics for Disease Prevention and Management

Joseph Finkelstein, MD PhD
Taught as independent study. 2 quarter credits, Third Quarter and Fourth Quarter. 
Focusing on health information technologies in ambulatory care, this course provides students with overview and theoretical underpinnings of health information systems supporting patient-centered primary care, health promotion, computer-guided disease management and prevention, telemonitoring and eHealth. Sample health information systems include ambulatory Electronic Medical Records, Disease Registries, Patient Portals, Provider Portals, secure patient-provider communication systems, home telemonitoring, telemedicine applications, interactive health education and counseling, computerized tools for shared decison making, team-based care management tools, decision support for quality assurance and clinical guidelines implementation, system interoperability.

ME 600.906 Real Time Disease Surveillance

Joseph Lombardo
Third Quarter- Online
While surveillance has always been an essential service of public health, the past decade has established the need and the technology for automated surveillance. Such surveillance provides public health decision makers with requisite data on the order of hours or days, enabling them to respond during a significant public health event.
In this course, we will review the needs and the technologies and provide students with the basic knowledge and skills they need to be critical consumers of these technologies and to enable to follow the emerging research literature over the future.

 

PH 609.631. Population Health Informatics

Weiner
Second Quarter
Introduces students to concepts, methods, and issues related to the application of health information technology (HIT) to population health. Emphasizes the population health potential of comprehensive electronic health records (EHRs), personal health records (PHRs), mobile health and telemedicine devices; and consumer focused internet-based tools. Covers the uses of HIT to define and identify populations and sub-populations of interest, describe the health status and needs of populations, improve the health of populations, and evaluate services provided to populations. Emphasizes the use of HIT within both local, regional and federal public health agencies and population-based private health care organizations such as integrated delivery systems and health insurance plans. Lessons are mainly US oriented but are also applicable to other high and middle income countries. SeeLink.

ME 600.712 Biomedical Data Processing & Algorithms (Previously Data Structures & Algorithms in Informatics)

Zhang (Face-to-Face)  NOT OFFERED IN 2012
First Quarter 
Tuesday 9:30am to 12:30pm

The course will introduce the main concepts of data, information and knowledge as applied to health information systems. It will introduce methodologies and algorithms that being used to process these data and information, and develop health information system. The course will provide students with opportunities to have exercise in a development environment to enhance the understanding the concepts of these data and information as well as actual information systems. At the end of the course, students should be able to develop a proto-type application that process and display specific data elements.

ME 600.713 Clinical Software Engineering

Philbin (Face-to-Face) NOT OFFERED IN 2012
Second Quarter
Tuesday 5:30pm - 8:30pm

The course will build on the concepts learned in Data Structures and Algorithms in Health Informatics and will teach students to create, test, and deploy programs using Ruby on Rails and the Eclipse Program Development Environment.  It will introduce key architecture components of medical information systems and web based methodologies for interacting with them.  The course will focus on rapid program prototyping and development.  It will also emphasize the importance of developing a testing environment, including code coverage and performance evaluation, concomitant with application development. 

At the end of the course, students should be able to use the Eclipse Program Development Environment to develop, test, and deploy web based medical applications using Ruby on Rails.

 

For Medical Students, Residents

ME 600.699 Health Sciences Informatics Elective

H Lehmann
Timing dependent on mutual schedules (1 to 2 month's duration)
Attached to the Health Sciences Training Programs, this elective provides students with basic informatics research skills and knowledge, focused on health sciences applications, data, information, and knowledge, decision support, evaluation. Students participate in program meetings and seminars, conduct self-study, spend time at information technology settings (permission pending), and are responsible for a project report at the end of the elective. The report may range from a literature review, to a system specification, to working code, or other deliverable, depending on the interests and skills of the student.

Requires faculty permission. Inquire at least 3 months before desired start date.

 

Other Required Courses for Degree Candidates

ME 600.803 HSI Grand Rounds (seminar)

A weekly seminar for students, faculty, and invited guests to present ongoing research and work in informatics. Spans the academic year. See the Grand Rounds page for more information.

ME 600.808 Health Sciences Informatics Capstone 

The purpose of the Capstone is to provide students an opportunity to:

• Demonstrate the ability to translate competencies established in classes and in prior experience into a real-world setting
• Enlarge their portfolio of completed documents or projects

The Capstone Project will generally last at least 2 quarters. Students will join an active work group, supervised directly or indirectly by the practicum preceptor. The student will be responsible for spending about 20% of his/her time at the Capstone site, with the specific timing to be negotiated with the practicum preceptor. Attendance may include attending project and staff meetings, as well as front-line activity, such as working with clients. The student is responsible for submitting a Capstone report to the Director within 2 weeks of completing the project. The final report shall document attendance, how (or whether) the learning objectives were met, and shall include the report generated for the preceptor. A presentation will be made of the final report at a Capstone Presentation Seminar, with students, faculty, and capstone preceptors in attendance. Capstone is for MS Applied and Post Bacc Certificate students.

 

Other Courses

Independent Study

Independent Study courses must be approved by the Program Director. Please note that it is important to follow the steps outlined below in order to comply with DHSI/SOM registration and grading policies. Students submit a course description to the Training Program Director, Course Instructor and Program Coordinator. The description will include the length of Independent Study (up to 2 quarters or 1 semester), the time commitment (given in hours per week or quarter), the student’s goals and what the deliverable will be. On approval by the Program Director, the Coordinator will supply you with the appropriate course number for registration. It is important that the course instructor be prepared to submit a letter grade on their departmental letterhead to the Program Coordinator.

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