IS 670 Health Informatics (3 credits)
The health care industry in the United States consumes about 20% of the Gross
National Product, touches everyone, and is information intensive. Information
systems have spread slowly from the billing room to the examination room, but
the pace of change is accelerating. Successful information systems applications
must be managed by people knowledgeable in the issues relevant to both health
care and information systems. This course examines those special issues and
covers: Requirements and Design Providers and Payers Fraud Transactions Standards
Privacy Security Personnel and Vendors Integration
Students must successfully complete IS 631 prior to enrolling for this course.
Example Syllabus - IS 670 Health Informatics
Each syllabus is an example of a course
structure and assignments and is subject to change at any time by
the course instructor or Program Director.
Learning Objectives
The focus of this course is information systems
in health care providers and health care payers. The student should
gain the ability to do the following as regards healthcare information
systems:
- identify needs for development of health information
systems and methods for designing healthcare information systems,
- delineate the typical components of a healthcare
information system and how those components relate to one another,
- identify the personnel categories and vendor
types involved in the healthcare industry,
- analyze the forces in government regulation
and industry compliance with special attention to fraud and privacy.
- analyze standards and knowledge bases in healthcare,
anticipate the evolving networks, and delineate the factors that
determine whether or not a system will be adopted by its users
and thus diffuse through the target population.
The course does not focus on consumer health information,
medical decision-making, or telemedicine.
1 Introduction, Requirements, Design
Introduction
- Distinguish health information systems from
management information systems
- Describe the history of information systems
in health care.
Requirements
- Describe the causes of rising costs in health
care and their relationship to information systems.
- Predict prominent trends for health information
systems based on the history.
Analysis and Design
- Identify how needs can and should be identified
for all customers/users/stakeholders of health information systems.
- Construct a preliminary analysis and design
for a health information system.
- Distinguish between approaches that successfully
involve the client and approaches that do not.
- Compose a method of collecting requirements
from health care professionals that visually presents information
to them that they readily understand.
2 Providers and Payers
Providers
- Distinguish the types of health care systems
serving middle-class families, poor families, and military personnel.
- Diagram the major components of a health information
system and indicate at least two subcomponents of each.
- Describe the flow of information in patient
management.
- Demonstrate how characteristics of patient
information peculiar to a clinical unit, such as radiology, lead
to unique characteristics of the information system underlying
that system.
Payers
- Diagram the basic operations of a health plan.
- Identify salient characteristics of information
systems applications in health plans.
- Analyze the differences between the government
health plan (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) and the
prominent private health plan association (Blue Cross and Blue
Shield).
- Delineate the differences in individual, small-,
and large-group plans
3 Personnel and Vendors
Personnel
- Predict the distribution of health care personnel
by type for the next decade based on the trends in the past one
hundred years and its impact on health information systems.
- Distinguish the responsibilities of doctors,
nurses, and allied health personnel as regards information systems.
- Identify the responsibilities of healthcare
information systems staff.
- Compare and contrast the types of positions
and salaries of members of the Health Information and Management
Systems Society and the American Health Information Management
Association
Vendors
- Identify the critical attributes of successful
consulting in health care.
- Order healthcare IT vendors by some attribute
of success, such as revenues.
- Construct a contract development plan for a
provider who is seeking an IT vendor to provide support.
4 Regulation
Compliance
- Predict the trends in government regulation
of business in the U.S.
- Design a corporate compliance program that
balances the various forces that work for and against compliance.
- Identify the impact of associations on regulating
American health care information systems.
- Identify international regulatory impact on
health care information systems.
Fraud
- Differentiate whistleblowers from fraud investigators.
- Demonstrate that controlling health insurance
fraud is a higher-level concern than controlling health insurance
solvency.
- Construct a logical model underlying software
for fraud control.
- Construct relationships between software to
support coding and software to support fraud detection.
- Demonstrate that shared information among payers
can increase the ability of fraud investigators to successfully,
semi-automatically detect fraud.
HIPAA
- Delineate the different parts of transaction
and code sets standardization.
- Identify the key requirements of the Privacy
Rule.
- Model security in terms of real-world policy,
computer models, and technical mechanisms.
5 Knowledge, Networking, Diffusion, and Conclusion
Knowledge
- Identify key standards in the health care information
systems arena and indicate how they support interoperability
- Delineate the pros and cons of various representation
and reasoning schemes for medical knowledge -- flow charts, databases,
decision theory, and rule-based expert systems.
- Differentiate vision and robotic systems from
medical diagnosis systems.
- Use effectively a medical literature retrieval
system.
Networking
- Identify the standards employed in several
technical examples of networking.
- Evaluate the role of government versus the
commercial sector in maintaining Community Health Information
Networks.
- Estimate the impact of the Web on the involvement
of patients in their health care.
Diffusion
- Predict the kinds of health care information
system innovations that are most difficult to diffuse.
- Identify four types of health care systems
globally and provide examples of countries employing each type
and relate this to information systems impact.
