Are you finding it difficult to keep up with the newest technologies and concepts such as electronic health records, e-prescribing and health information exchange? Do you need a course that discusses these topics plus many more and fits into your busy schedule?

HSA 4192/5197 Introduction to Medical Informatics is an overview of the interdisciplinary nature of Medical Informatics that should be of interest to physicians, nurses, health care administrators, medical librarians, IT techs and others. To meet your scheduling needs, this course is taught completely online, with an emphasis on the real world interaction between medicine and technology and not on theory. Every effort is made to provide practical and up-to-date examples of issues and interesting emerging technologies for the student. All slides are updated each semester the course is scheduled. The Introductory course is one of four online courses towards a Certificate in Medical Informatics offered by the University of West Florida.

One of the reasons our course is unique is that it is closely linked to our textbook, Health Informatics: Practical Guide for Healthcare and Information Technology Professionals, 5th Edition. We supply book chapters in a .PDF format to all of our students free-of-charge. Please do not purchase the paperback or electronic book from the publisher if you are planning to enroll in the course and take advantage of the most-up-to-date electronic copy that will be supplied to you for FREE. The free electronic copy supplied in our courses will form the basis of all exam questions in these courses.

The modules we will cover in this online course are as follows:

• Overview of Medical Informatics: definitions, origins, organizations, careers, degrees and resources
• Online Medical Resources and Search Engines: free and fee-based resources; learn about Google, PubMed and several other meta-engines
• Patient Informatics: origins, Internet and patient education, patient web portals, personal health records, e-visits and secure patient-physician communication
• Electronic Health Records: major advantages, obstacles, key components, how to compare and select and pitfalls
• Practice Management Systems: learn about how medical offices route patients through an office experience to include registration, the encounter, billing and scheduling
• Health Information Exchange: learn about health information organizations, the nationwide health information network
• Architectures of Information Systems: learn about web services and a variety of wired and wireless networks
• Data Standards: learn about why it is important to have data standards so disparate systems can share information and become interoperable
• Privacy and Security: learn about HIPAA and security issues all health information technology workers must  understand
• Mobile Technology: learn about the history of PDAs, medical software programs, new medical platforms like the BlackBerry and iPhone
• Evidence Based Guidelines and Clinical Practice Guidelines: learn about why evidence is important, tips to read the medical literature better, EBM tools and resources; how and why to create CPGs and in what format
• Disease Management/Disease Registries and Pay for Performance : learn why everyone is concerned about chronic diseases, how technology can help and how reimbursement may be partly determined by performance
• Patient Safety and Information Technology and E-prescribing: discover the multiple ways technology can impact patient safety to include electronic prescribing
• Quality Improvement Strategies: learn how technology can assist in quality improvement strategies to include pay for performance
• Telemedicine and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems: discover all of the ways medical care can be delivered remotely such as e-ICUs; find out more about medical imaging and how you can view them on your desktop computer
• Bioinformatics and Public Health Informatics: learn about projects such as the Human Genome Project and the Public Health Information Network
• E-Research: learn about the new tools available today to facilitate a paperless research experience
• Emerging Trends in Medical Informatics and Information Technology: discover evolving technologies such as voice recognition, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, VoWiFi and biometrics