The student will work independently, under the supervision of one or more faculty advisers, on a topic of mutual interest that is beyond the depth of or not covered in other courses.

This course provides a rigorous introduction to the principles of medical informatics. The focus of this course is on the study of the nature of medical information and its use in clinical practice and clinical quality improvement. Key topics include: the electronic medical record (EMR) and its impact on health care delivery, the Internet and mobile computing as sources of medical information, Health care information systems, the software development lifecycle, the importance of the informatics specialists in medicine and the various roles they can play, and government economic incentives and policy issues in healthcare such as privacy, confidentiality, including health care regulatory and accreditation issues and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Students will participate in online discussion of medical informatics. They will also investigate several topics of interest in the field and provide presentations.

This course will provide students with an understanding of application integration concepts in healthcare. Students will also learn medical business processes and how they impact data integration within a healthcare setting. Middleware message brokers will be examined along with the use of the HL7 messaging standard. Web services and other forms of data integration will be studied. Students will develop integration solutions to support healthcare information systems exchange and validation procedures and solutions to ensure the quality of information exchanged between healthcare systems.