Health Informatics

What Is Health Informatics?

The science of using data, information and knowledge to improve health — the DIKW pyramid, sub-fields, informatics roles and what you'll be able to do by the end of this course.

The Informatics Discipline: History & Landscape

From early hospital computing and expert systems to EHR adoption, interoperability policy and AI — key milestones, organizations (AMIA, HIMSS, HL7), and recurring lessons.

Healthcare Delivery, Payment & Quality for Informaticists

The care continuum, the care team, how care is paid for, value-based care, quality and safety frameworks — the context every informatics solution must fit.

How Clinicians Think & Work

Diagnostic reasoning, heuristics and cognitive biases, information needs at the point of care, interruptions and cognitive load — and what they mean for system design.

Ethics, Law & Policy in Health Informatics

Core bioethics principles applied to data and technology, HIPAA privacy and security, the Cures Act, consent and data sharing, research ethics, and ethical AI.

Representing Health Data

Structured vs unstructured data, data types, the clinical data model (entity–attribute–value, observations), metadata and provenance, and data quality by design.

Terminologies & Ontologies in Depth

Concepts, descriptions and relationships; SNOMED CT hierarchies and attributes; LOINC's six axes; RxNorm concepts; mapping between systems and the UMLS.

Representing Clinical Knowledge: Guidelines, Rules & CQL

From narrative guidelines to computable knowledge — rules, decision tables, order sets, Arden Syntax, Clinical Quality Language (CQL), CDS Hooks and knowledge management.

Evidence-Based Practice & Information Retrieval

PICO questions, searching PubMed/MEDLINE with MeSH, the evidence hierarchy, appraising studies, point-of-care resources and how informatics delivers evidence into workflows.

Clinical Natural Language Processing

Why clinical text is hard, NLP tasks (entity recognition, negation, normalization), rule-based vs machine learning vs large language models, evaluation and real-world uses.

Clinical Information Systems Landscape

The EHR and the systems around it — architecture choices, core functions, departmental systems, integration patterns and how informaticists evaluate a system.

CPOE & Medication Safety Informatics

The evidence for CPOE, medication error types, closed-loop medication management, dose checking design, barcode and smart pump integration, and measuring medication safety.

Clinical Decision Support: Design & Evaluation

The CDS taxonomy, the CDS five rights, alert design, calculators and risk scores, governance, and evaluating CDS impact on process, outcomes and burden.

Nursing Informatics

The nurse informaticist role, nursing documentation and standardized terminologies (NANDA-I, NIC, NOC, ICNP, CCC), reducing documentation burden, and nursing data for quality and staffing.

Imaging, Laboratory & Pathology Informatics

DICOM, PACS and RIS, vendor-neutral archives, digital pathology, laboratory information systems, autoverification, test utilization and AI in diagnostics.

Interoperability: Levels, Value & Policy

The four levels of interoperability (foundational, structural, semantic, organizational), why exchange is still hard, standards bodies, USCDI and the U.S. policy landscape.

HL7 v2 & Clinical Document Architecture

How HL7 v2 messages and C-CDA documents work, where each is used, their strengths and limitations, and reading them as an informaticist.

FHIR Deep Dive

Resources and references, profiles and implementation guides (US Core), extensions, search parameters, Bundles, SMART on FHIR authorization, bulk data and testing tools.

Terminology Services & Mapping Projects

Local-to-standard mapping (lab to LOINC, drugs to RxNorm), mapping quality, terminology servers and FHIR terminology operations, and maintaining maps over time.

Health Information Exchange & National Networks

HIE models (directed, query, consumer-mediated), regional HIEs, national networks, TEFCA and QHINs, public health exchange, patient matching and consent management.

Human Factors & Usability

Human factors engineering, usability principles and heuristics, user-centered design, usability testing methods and the System Usability Scale (SUS).

Workflow & Process Modeling

Process mapping notations (flowcharts, swimlanes, BPMN), value stream mapping, identifying waste and failure modes (FMEA), and simulating workflow changes.

Technology Adoption & Change Management

Why people adopt or resist technology — diffusion of innovations, technology acceptance (TAM/UTAUT), change models (Kotter, ADKAR), clinician engagement and burnout.

Health IT Safety & Unintended Consequences

How health IT causes harm, categories of unintended consequences, ONC SAFER Guides, safety event reporting and analysis, and building a health IT safety program.

Implementation Science & Evaluating Informatics Interventions

Evaluation questions and designs (pre/post, controlled, interrupted time series, stepped wedge, randomized), frameworks like RE-AIM and CFIR, mixed methods and reporting results.

Consumer Health Informatics

Patients as information users — portals, open notes, health apps and wearables, health literacy and digital literacy, shared decision-making tools and patient-generated health data.

Telehealth & Remote Patient Monitoring

Modalities of telehealth (synchronous video, audio, asynchronous store-and-forward, e-consults, RPM), evidence and appropriate use, workflow and data integration, policy and equity.

Public Health Informatics

Surveillance systems, notifiable disease reporting (ELR, eCR), syndromic surveillance, immunization information systems, vital records, outbreak detection and data modernization.

Population Health Informatics

Registries, attribution and panels, care gaps, risk stratification, social determinants data and community resource referral platforms, and measuring population outcomes.

Global Health Informatics

Health information systems in low- and middle-income countries, open-source platforms (DHIS2, OpenMRS), mHealth, community health worker tools, international standards and digital health strategies.

The Learning Health System

Continuous learning cycles from practice data to knowledge and back to practice — data infrastructure, embedded research, pragmatic trials, feedback loops and culture.

Clinical Research Informatics

Clinical trial systems (CTMS, EDC), cohort discovery (i2b2), common data models (OMOP, PCORnet), real-world data and evidence, data standards (CDISC) and research privacy.

Machine Learning for Informaticists

Supervised vs unsupervised learning, the model lifecycle, features and labels from EHR data, evaluation (discrimination and calibration), bias, drift and what informaticists must ask before deployment.

Generative AI in Clinical Care

How large language models work at a high level, clinical use cases (ambient documentation, inbox replies, summarization, coding), risks (hallucination, bias, privacy), evaluation and safe implementation.

AI Governance & Responsible AI in Healthcare

Building an AI governance program — inventory, risk tiers, review processes, transparency (ONC HTI-1, model cards), FDA oversight of AI devices, monitoring, equity and accountability.

Informatics Leadership & Governance

CMIO, CNIO and CHIO roles, IT governance structures, prioritization, physician and nurse champions, portfolio management and leading change across clinical and technical teams.

Demonstrating Value: Health IT ROI

Building a business case — costs (one-time and ongoing), benefits (hard and soft), ROI, payback, net present value, benefit realization tracking and value beyond money.

Precision Medicine & Genomic Informatics

Genomic data basics, pharmacogenomics in the EHR, genetic test results as structured data, clinical decision support for genomics, family history, privacy and equity.

Capstone: An Informatics Solution, End to End

Design an informatics intervention from problem to evaluation — needs assessment, workflow analysis, standards and data design, CDS/UX design, implementation and evaluation plan, ethics and value.

Job-Ready: Careers in Health Informatics

Career paths for clinical and non-clinical backgrounds, certifications (AMIA ACHIP, CPHIMS/CAHIMS, ANCC informatics nursing, board certification in clinical informatics), education options, portfolios and interviews.