Lecturer: Professor Jim Warren
I've now offered this course twice (in semester 1 2008 and semester 1 2009). In 2010 we'll be running it in semester 2 (to start approx 20 Jul). Like all postgrad courses in the School of Population Health, it'll be in intensive mode, meaning that there are four all-day sessions (conceptually each divided into four lectures - two either side of lunch) spead fairly evenly throughout the semester.
I'm keen to see both technical (i.e., computer science, software engineering and information systems) students as well as clinical (medicine, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy etc.) students in this course. Just contact me if you think you might be interested.
The course is intended to provide you with a familiarity of the methods and issues associated with creating and maintaining tools that support better delivery of healthcare by providing their users with guidance on healthcare procedures. This includes computer support for diagnosis and treatment. It may be very detailed (e.g., how to adjust a dose) or very high-level (helping to formulate a schedule of health services). In all cases, it's about software that produces recommendations tailored to an individual ('a patient'). The end-user might be the patient - in which case the decision support system is functioning as a consumer health informatics tool.
The course is intended to help you to understand the methods and issues so that you might do better if you ever: (a) participate in a Healthcare Decision Support System development team (as a designer, tester or programmer); (b) manage such a team; or (c) participate in the decision to purchase such a system. As such, we place a strong emphasis on evaluation, as well as development; and, with respect to development, we place a strong emphasis on design.
The course is still changing a fair bit from year to year, but to give you an indciation of the content, here are some of the materials we used in semester 1 2009
I hope this catches your interest. Would love to see you in the course in 2010. I hope I haven't scared anybody. Please note that this course has been passed (with good marks!) by both IT students with no health background and by clinical students with no IT background. That said, if you are thinking of doing the Postgraduate Diploma in Health Science in Health Informatics, I recommend that you take HLTHINFO 728 Principles of Health Informatics first if at all possible.