• 054300 - E-HEALTH METHODS

• Blended Learning & Flipped Classroom

e-Health is defined as the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for health. In the context of ageing population and increase in chronic patients-related healthcare expenditure, ICT represents a key component for ensuring quality, safety, access and efficiency, also stimulating new paradigms of care, from a paternalistic to a collaborative model, from acute care to prevention.

The goal of the course is to enable students with relevant tools and concepts that are needed to master the complexity of ICT in healthcare in this continuously evolving field. Through the course, structured in two parts, Methods and Applications, which are interleaved throughout  the semester, also practical projects will be proposed to groups of students, to stimulate their problem-solving, and giving an opportunity to present and discuss their work to an audience.

Innovation in teaching modality will be also utilized during the class.

Starting A.A.2021/22, the course "E-Health: Methods and Applications" will contribute for 5 CFU to the achievement of PoliMI Ambassador in SMART INFRASTRUCTURES certification (https://www.polimi.it/corsi/percorsi-di-alta-formazione/green-technologies-e-smart-infrastructures/#c57225)

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

Overview of e-health data: Data flow in healthcare, Classification of Data type, Data collection and recording, Use of e-health data, From data to information to knowledge based system in healthcare. Interoperability and the importance of standards in healthcare

E-health terminologies: Definitions of terminologies, classifications and onthologies; some relevant examples: Systematized Nomenclature for Medicine (SNOMED CT), Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and Metamap.

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

Methods to design, develop and evaluate e-health technologies: the holistic user centered approach starting from the contextual inquiries, and the identification of functional requirements and technical specifications, towards the development of prototypes, and the iterative and final testing.

The design, development and testing of serious games for the screening and training of learning disabilities.

Digital medicine for Ageing in place: smart Internet of thing objects for remote monitoring; transparent daily life monitoring as a frontiers towards early diagnosis and a new model of care. The role of Artificial Intelligence in the context of Ageing in place.

Decision making in e-health: Biomedical Decision Making: probabilistic clinical reasoning; Management of uncertainties for decision making; Clinical Decision support system; Mining hospital data to predict patient outcomes.

E-health for clinical trials: the use of computerized systems in clinical investigations: electronic report form, electronic patient reported outcome measures, e-health technologies to support randomized clinical trials, towards decentralised clinical trials.

A project laboratory is mandatory and is an integral part of the course. The objective of projects is to give the students the opportunity to tackle a real problem using concepts learned in class, working in small groups and organizing their work. Projects will be assigned at the beginning of the semester and are expected to be given in at fixed deadlines defined by the time the project will be assigned. The evaluation of projects will be based on the produced reports and on a final presentation.

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.