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

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 have been updated and are current as of July 2008. 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 Medical Informatics: Practical Guide for the Healthcare Professional 2008. We supply book chapters in a pdf format to all of our students free-of-charge.

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
• Interoperability: learn about health information organizations, the natiowide health information network, data standards and HIPAA
• 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
• 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
• Emerging Trends in Medical Informatics and Information Technology: discover evolving technologies such as voice recognition, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, VoWiFi and biometrics