Course Description


FIMS 9325A-001 (Fall 2018)   Special Topic: Topics in Health Informatics

Course Description
Evidence-based healthcare (EBHC) is one the most influential movements in healthcare. Its main purpose is to increase and improve the use of evidence (i.e., data, information, and knowledge) by stakeholders (e.g., health practitioners, policy-makers, public health managers, etc.). However, the role that health informatics tools (HITs) can play often goes unnoticed within mainstream EBHC, and their analysis and evaluation receive little attention. HITs permeate EBHC at every turn: whether in the use of data and text mining tools for evidence generation, distillation, or synthesis; decision support for incorporating evidence-based protocols into clinical workflow; or web-based visualization tools for gaining insight into patterns of data. As medical knowledge continues to grow, and HITs advance, explicit understanding of and investigations into the relationship between HITs and EBHC become increasingly vital. In this course, we will examine different components of HITs—particularly their user interface and how data can and should be presented, the role of analytics tools in distilling knowledge for EBHC, and the importance of the human-centeredness of HITs and factors that contribute to this.

This course is no longer active. Please contact FIMS Undergraduate Student Services, fims@uwo.ca, for more information.




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