An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society

Transcription

1 An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society A Course proposal for 2010 Healthcare Industry Skills Innovation Award Sponsored by the IBM Academic Initiative submitted by Graduate School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences (GSITMS), University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia Goal The goal of An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society is to empower students to understand information technologies in health with a particular emphasis on the way in which information technologies are transforming health care globally. Approach The course will be designed to be delivered in a virtual or a face to face class room setting. Core concepts will be introduced using online workbook based exercises that utilises written, audio and video based material and open source programs available online. In a face to face setting, students work through most workbook exercises individually and at their own pace. They come together with other students and perform select group exercises collaboratively. At all times, the lecturer provides private guidance and elaborates on concepts in small group discussions. In a virtual classroom setting, the lecturer responds to student queries asynchronously and conducts group exercises using meeting facilitation software. The aim of the approach is to engage students by reducing passive learning. Students are encouraged to seek information from public sources online, to assimilate the knowledge and confirm their understanding with the lecturer and class colleagues by performing hands-on exercises. Many of the exercises involve updating a class wiki to facilitate learning from others. The target audience is: 1. Undergraduate or postgraduate students in medical, allied health or complementary health programs who need to understand how technological changes are transforming health care and; 2. Undergraduate or postgraduate students of information technology courses who need to understand the pressing challenges and opportunities for the application of IT to health An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society 1 of 5

2 No information technology or health care knowledge is presumed. The curriculum is designed to entice students to appreciate the moment in history and the transforming effect information technologies have on health care. Benefit of the curriculum The curriculum is designed to: Inspire students to understand, appreciate and value the transforming effect of information technologies in health Inspire information technology students to take a deep appreciation of the health care sector's unique challenges and opportunities into subsequent information technology programs Inspire health care students to embrace technological developments with a deeper knowledge of the challenges and opportunities for the enhancement of healthcare delivery Enable information technology and healthcare students to work collaboratively and gain an appreciation of their respective professional cultures. Outline plan The curriculum is divided into 14 workbooks designed to be completed in sequence over a 14 week semester comprising 4 hours class time per week, or in intensive mode comprising 7, 8 hour classes. The workbook topics are: Workbook 1: The Health Care system in 21st Century Definitions. Trends in health care around the world. Globalisation. Future health care visions eg. Smart planet. Health workforce shortage. Medical tourism. Snapshot of electronic health records, Overview of computational intelligence analytics, business process and decision support Workbook 2: The Electronic Health Record around the world Electronic Health Record initiatives. HealthVault, Google Health, Government based centralised approaches, Challenges for an electronic health record; interoperability, security, privacy, availability. Workbook 3. Messaging Standards. HL7 v2 Introduction standards. ISO. HL7 history and community. HL7 v2 structure. Compliance validation. Hands on exercises in decoding v2 messages Workbook 4. Messaging Standards. HL7 v3, openehr Overview of openehr. Overview of HL7 v3. Hands on exercises on collaboratively developing an openehr clinical specification. Hand on exercises on decoding a v3 message Workbook 5. Informatics for Complementary and Western medicine Trends for co-existence of complementary and western medicine. Challenges for health informatics. Terminological standards; Snomed. Can Snomed, HL7, openehr handle complementary medicine? Workbook 6. Computational intelligence. Enterprise Health Analytics I Integrating data across the organisation or sector. Introduction to knowledge-based systems and their use in Health care systems. Construction of knowledge base from health data and information. Preprocessing, transforming data, mining, interpreting. Knowledge generation An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society 2 of 5

3 using computational intelligence tools such as classification tools, feature selection tools, clustering tools, rule-generation tools, association rule mining tools and their application to health care systems. Hands on exercises with Cognos. Workbook 7. Computational intelligence. Enterprise Health Analytics II Advanced use of analytical mining with DB2 Intelligent miner and real world datasets in diabetes prediction and visualization; adverse drug reaction mining and hospital pharmacy information systems. Hands on exercises with DB2 intelligent miner. Workbook 8. Computational intelligence. Business process I Introduction to business process modeling, process optimisation and automation. Introduction to Websphere, strategies to develop effective health care information systems. Hands on exercises with WebSphere Workbook 9. Computational intelligence Business process II Collaborative construction of a business process model with Websphere, RFID based patient tracking, product tracking, active alarming systems and inventory management in Hospital, RFID based prescription reader systems for impaired patients Workbook 10. Computational intelligence Clinical Decision Support Systems Introduction to Clinical decision support systems (DSS). Computer games in health. Challenges for DSS development, Examples of DSS's: diagnostic systems, web service based decision support systems for patient s response following treatment, automated alert systems for doctors, conflict prescriptions alert systems. Group decision making processes and tools for medical teams Workbook 11. Reference architectures in health Overview of reference architectures. Benefits of reference architectures. Example of the IBM Healthcare provider payment architecture Workbook 12. Ethical, Privacy and Security Issues. Regulation of phenomena; social, legal, economic, natural constraints. Principles of privacy. Overview of technological devices for security; encryption. Challenges for statistical medical databases. Workbook 14.The future - Computer Applications, Informatics and Biomedicine. Future trends as globalisation continues. Harmonisation of standards. Continuous monitoring of patients. Smart planet vision. Milestones Milestone 1: Early intervention strategy assessment. By workbook 4 students submit the first three workbooks. This enables lecturers to perform an assessment of the degree of support a student needs Milestone 2: On completion of workbook 4, students commence an assignment where they work in groups to design and specify an information technology vision and policy for an actual health care institution or association in the developing world. A video presentation about the vision and policy is to be recorded and uploaded to share with others and for assessment Milestone 3: On course completion, all workbooks are to be submitted for assessment Current funding The GSITMS will commit the equivalent of 1 Academic level C person for 320 hours (8 weeks full time) at $AUD21,000 ($US20,100) for the creation of the course. An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society 3 of 5

4 Staff Dr Andrew Stranieri. Leader Health Informatics Laboratory, GSITMS, University of Ballarat, Victoria Australia. Dr Stranieri has published three books and over eighty journal and conference articles and book chapters, over the last eighteen years in the fields of artificial intelligence and data mining applied to law, health and group reasoning. The argumentation based formulation of legal reasoning he developed led to the use of machine learning methods to model judicial decision making. With, Professor John Yearwood, he extended and formalised an argumentation based approach for modelling structure and inference called the Generic Actual Argument Model. That model led to the formation of a spin-out company he managed that commercially developed intelligent systems in law, intensive care nursing, counselling and cancer patient's needs assessment. The argumentation model ideas evolved into approaches that groups of people can use to enhance collective decision making. Currently, Dr Stranieri lectures Health Informatics and Data mining at the University of Ballarat. Professor John Yearwood is Professor of Informatics in the Graduate School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Centre for Informatics and Applied Optimization. His research spans areas of data mining, argumentation, reasoning and decision support and its applications in health and law. In 2001 he received a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship from the Australian Research Council to work on argumentation and narrative. His work in data mining and computational intelligence has led to the development of new learning and hybrid learning algorithms for artificial neural networks and is the recipient of a number of Australian Research Council Grants in these areas. Professor Yearwood was a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council funded Project involving data mining the Australian adverse drug reactions database. He has worked with a wide range of industry partners in telecommunications, logistics, health and sustainability. Professor Yearwood is currently the editor for the Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology. He has over 160 refereed journal and conference publications. Dr Shamsul Huda is a research fellow at the Health Informatics Laboratory, at the University of Ballarat. He has extensive research experience in machine learning, data mining, signal processing and sequential pattern recognition and their application to health imaging and bio-informatics. His research on Hidden Markov Model based approaches and Training algorithms has been applied to numerous datasets in health including sleep, tobacco and cancer. Interested collaborators GSITMS will seek to enhance an existing collaboration with IBM Global Services Australia Pty Ltd where we currently jointly offer an innovative Earn as you learn undergraduate Bachelor of Information Technology (Professional Practice) degree GSITMS will also seek to involve the Australian HealthCare Messaging Laboratory, a HL7 compliance and validation facility, recently spun-out of the University to contribute to the An Introduction to Health Informatics for a Global Information Based Society 4 of 5

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