• 098465 - E-HEALTH METHODS

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is a key component to ensuring quality, safety, access and efficiency in healthcare. This course introduces current approaches and future directions in e-health and the use of ICT in healthcare in general, as well as key concepts and tools from the underlying discipline of health informatics.

Topics include: electronic health records (EHRs); hospital and primary care and public health information systems; supporting clinical decision-making for health professionals through ICT; e-health in the community for preventive healthcare and for patient and career support; regulatory influences on e-health including management and governance, privacy, security, and confidentiality; the role of data standards, vocabularies, and nomenclatures in e-health; research and development in e-health.

Please note that this list is purely indicative and class arguments may change due to teaching needs in this highly evolving field.

Introduction to e-health

• Overview of e-health data
• Data types
• Data collection and recording
• Use of e-health data

E-health for healthcare professionals

• E-health in the context of health, social and self-care
• E-health applications for healthcare professionals:

• Who are the healthcare professionals?
• Different healthcare professionals and their way of using e-health
• Different types of e-health for healthcare professionals

• Decision making in e-health:
• Integration of e-health information: cognitive science principles
• Management of uncertainties for decision making
• Electronic Medical Records / Electronic Health Records and the safety and quality of patient care
• Clinical Decision Support Systems / Mining hospital data to predict patient outcomes
• Electronic prescription and delivery / Electronic medications management

• Imaging informatics

Design and implementation of e-health

• Technical demands on e-health systems
• Technical infrastructure
• e-health system architecture

• Health informatics standards and terminologies
• DICOM
• HL7
• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)
• Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
• Systematized Nomenclature for Medicine (SNOMED CT)

• Information retrieval techniques for data-mining of medical records
• Natural language processing

Students are required to know the basic principles of programming.

The assessment will be based on a written exam, covering the two parts of the integrated course (Methods and Applications) at the end of the course, and on the projects developed in the laboratory part of the course. These projects will be presented to the instructor and colleagues at the end of the course. The scores of the written exam and of the project part, weighting each for 50% of the final score, will be summed to compute the total score. In addition, optional oral exam is allowed with a +/- 3 points range modification on the total score.