Health Informatics in the Classroom: An Empirical Study to Investigate Higher Education's Response to Healthcare Transformation
Authors: Noushin Ashrafi; Jean-Pierre Kuilboer; Chaitanya Joshi; I. Ran; Priyanka Pande
Year: 2014

1. INTRODUCTION Healthcare professionals are confronted with pressures of government agencies and health insurance companies to improve their efficiency and effectiveness (Hasman and Albert, 1997). To assist healthcare professionals to achieve such efficacy, a great deal of money is spent to develop health information systems. Healthcare informatics has the potential to improve communication, and management of health information, which are the underlying ingredients of healthcare transformation. Since the lack of understanding of the principles of health informatics prohibits gaining a full advantage of these initiatives, it is increasingly essential that healthcare professionals raise their knowledge level of IT enabled solutions. To begin, we need to agree on a working definition of Health Informatics (HI). For the purpose of this study we refer to the definition given by National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR), which defines health informatics as "the interdisciplinary study of the design, development, adoption and application of IT-based innovations in healthcare services delivery, management and planning" (Procter, 2009). From this definition we can deduct that it is a discipline at the intersection of information science, computer science, and health care. Today, however, as technology and the volume, velocity, and variability of available data in healthcare is evolving, the discipline has embraced the notions of big data and analytics as well as decision support systems and electronic medical records. These concepts and their enabling technologies facilitate information driven decisions in healthcare sector. As it is the case for all new concepts, there is a variation over the terminologies related to health care and technology. Google trend, based on google search, identifies and ranks the following terminologies as of August 2013 (Figure 1). An interesting observation is the inclusion of 'health informatics jobs' in the listing. The inevitability of technology in healthcare management has captured public attention and it is now the norm, not the exception, that healthcare staff, regardless of their positioning, clinical or non-clinical (administrative), need an additional layer of training for effective job performance. The traditional skills, offered by current curricula, consisted of managerial and leadership, team building, problem solving, communications, and project management. The additional layer focuses around technology and includes the knowledge of healthcare information systems, understanding of healthcare and information systems regulatory and audit requirements, and understanding of clinical applications and processes, each of which could be divided down to more details and more specific skills. The question is what is being done to fill the skill gap between traditional and new requirements appropriate in the information age, where data and information discovery and management are the key ingredients of decision making. To have a better understanding of public interest in health informatics and related jobs we turned to Google trend again. Although not a scientific approach, this very realistic measure indicates the level of interest by the public for various concepts. We used this capability in the context of health informatics and results are displayed in Figure 2. The horizontal axis represents time (starting from 2004), and the vertical is used to assess the level of interest for 'health informatics' over time. [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] We inserted a trend line, which shows an upward movement indicating an increasing interest in the concept of 'health informatics.' The graph's interactive capabilities allow allocating highs and lows over time. http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=health+informatics#q=health+informatics&cmpt=q&geo=US The regional interest is conveyed through a map (Figure 3) where seven states with highest index numbers are Maryland, Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, and Oregon followed closely by Massachusetts with an index of 59. …