On Teaching International Courses on Health Information Systems

Abstract

SummaryBackgroundHealth information systems (HIS) are one of the most important areas for biomedical and health informatics. In order to professionally deal with HIS well-educated informaticians are needed. Because of these reasons, in 2001 an international course has been established: The Frank – van Swieten Lectures on Strategic Information Management of Health Information Systems.ObjectivesReporting about the Frank – van Swieten Lectures and about our students‘ feedback on this course during the last 16 years. Summarizing our lessons learned and making recommendations for such international courses on HIS.MethodsThe basic concept of the Frank – van Swieten lectures is to teach the theoretical background in local lectures, to organize practical exercises on modelling sub-information systems of the respective local HIS and finally to conduct Joint Three Days as an international meeting were the resulting models are introduced and compared.ResultsDuring the last 16 years, the Universities of Amsterdam, Braunschweig, Heidelberg/Heilbronn, Leipzig as well as UMIT were involved in running this course. Overall, 517 students from these universities participated. Our students‘ feedback was clearly positive. The Joint Three Days of the Frank – van Swieten Lectures, where at the end of the course all students can meet, turned out to be an important component of this course. Based on the last 16 years, we recommend common teaching materials, agreement on equivalent clinical areas for the exercises, support of group building of international student groups, motivation of using a collaboration platform, ensuring quality management of the course, addressing different levels of knowledge of the students, and ensuring sufficient funding for joint activities.ConclusionsAlthough associated with considerable additional efforts, we can clearly recommend establishing such international courses on HIS, such as the Frank – van Swieten Lectures.

Reflections Towards the Future of Medical Informatics

“…• Since 2001, for 21 years, courses on strategic information management of health information systems were given in the summer semesters to informatics students from 4 countries, the so-called Frank-van-Swieten Lectures [31]. In Figure 4 the course is denoted as "Health Information Systems (M.Sc.)".…”

Should Degree Programs in Biomedical and Health Informatics be Dedicated or Integrated?

“…For specialization in medical informatics ≥70 CP are needed, coming from either computer science electives in medical informatics or from the minor in medicine M.Sc. in computer science at TU Braunschweig competence area 1st year 2nd year 1st semester 2nd semester 3rd semester 4th semester computer science [62-68CP] Computer science elective courses for students, specializing in medical informatics: health-enabling technologies A [6CP], health-enabling technologies B [4CP], health information systems B [5CP] [ 21 ] , as well as seminar [5CP], project work [15CP], and master thesis [30CP] in medical informatics. math.…”