LII:Health Informatics for Better and Safer Healthcare

Title: Health Informatics for Better and Safer Healthcare

Author for citation: Maxim Topaz

License for content: Unknown

Publication date: 2023

This is an IsraelX-created course that is released on the edX platform. The introductory eight-week course is designed to help learners "to bridge the current gaps in health informatics education and introduce the major aspects of the field to novice and advanced clinical and technical audiences." The course is free to take. A verified certificate of completion, via a Verified track from IsrealX, is available afterwards for $49 USD. The course stated in March 2023, with the free audit track ending April 17.

The edX course description:

"Healthcare providers around the globe (e.g., doctors, nurses, physical or occupational therapists, etc.) are increasingly relying on health information technology, like electronic health records, for their daily routine tasks. Although using health information technology holds tremendous promises (like personalized and precision medicine to all) it can also result in unforeseen consequences leading to patients’ harm. To fulfill the promise of better and safer care through information technology, health providers need to learn about the existing systems design and capabilities while technical experts (e.g., computer programmers) need to understand the complex healthcare needs and processes. This course aims to bridge the current gaps in health informatics education and introduce the major aspects of the field to novice and advanced clinical and technical audiences."

"What you'll learn:

What kinds of careers are out there in health information technology?
What are the core disciplines on which health information technology is built?
How does clinical decision support work?
What is the electronic health record comprised of, and how does it work?
What do we need health terminologies for?
How is text and data mining used in healthcare?
What type of image processing is used to make health imagery usable?
What happens when health information systems have low usability?
How is a patient’s safety warranted by health information systems?"

About the authors

The course is taught by Dr. Maxim Topaz, senior lecturer at the School of Nursing, University of Haifa (Israel). "In the past, Dr. Topaz was involved with health policy (national and international levels), leadership (e.g. Chair of the Emerging Professionals Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association) and health entrepreneurship. Dr. Topaz's clinical experience is in internal and urgent medicine. He earned his PhD degree as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and his Masters and Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Haifa, Israel. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham Women's Hospital. He published more than fifty articles on topics related to health informatics and received numerous prestigious awards for his work. His current work focusses on developing natural language processing solutions for big data in healthcare."

General layout and contents of the course

The EdEx description notes the following:

"The entire course covers 4 weeks divided into 11 modules. Completion certificates are issued on the basis of participation in all 11 modules and submission of a final project. Weekly commitment is estimated to be about 3 hours of learning and engaging in course related projects. The final grade for the course will be calculated based on submission of the weekly quizzes (100% of the grade)."