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How can we improve informatics education for German nurses? Statements derived from the first German nursing informatics summer school.

For German nurses it is difficult to join training in health informatics besides their professional activity. The authors have successfully established a German nursing informatics summer school in shape of a 5 day intensive curriculum which they offer to German nurses during the summer holidays. The summer school introduces nurses into health informatics and nursing informatics. It targets interested nursing staff, nurse executives, and nurse teachers. It promotes self learning abilities for continued self education of the participants. One of its goals is to enable participants to formulate their own requirements in health information processing and to influence system design and system introduction. The paper presents the curriculum, talks about first experiences, and demonstrates the results of an evaluation among the participants. Conclusions are drawn in a set of statements on informatics education of nurses.

Curriculum↗

Recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) on education in health and medical informatics.

The International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) agreed on international recommendations in health informatics/medical informatics education. These should help to establish courses, course tracks or even complete programs in this field, to further develop existing educational activities in the various nations and to support international initiatives concerning education in health and medical informatics (HMI), particularly international activities in educating HMI specialists and the sharing of courseware. The IMIA recommendations centre on educational needs for healthcare professionals to acquire knowledge and skills in information processing and information and communication technology. The educational needs are described as a three-dimensional framework. The dimensions are: 1) professionals in healthcare (physicians, nurses, HMI professionals, ...), 2) type of specialisation in health and medical informatics (IT users, HMI specialists) and 3) stage of career progression (bachelor, master, ...). Learning outcomes are defined in terms of knowledge and practical skills for healthcare professionals in their role (a) as IT user and (b) as HMI specialist. Recommendations are given for courses/course tracks in HMI as part of educational programs in medicine, nursing, healthcare management, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, health record administration, and informatics/computer science as well as for dedicated programs in HMI (with bachelor, master or doctor degree). To support education in HMI, IMIA offers to award a certificate for high quality HMI education and supports information exchange on programs and courses in HMI through a WWW server of its Working Group on Health and Medical Informatics Education (http:www.imia.org/wg1).

Curriculum↗

Digital Libraries and Recent Medical Informatics Research. Findings from the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2001.

The Yearbook of Medical Informatics is published annually by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and contains a selection of recent excellent papers on medical informatics research (http://www.med.uni-heidelberg.de/mi/yearbook/index.htm). The special topic of the just published Yearbook 2001 is "Digital Libraries and Medicine". Digital libraries have changed dramatically and will continue to change the way we work with medical knowledge. The selected papers present recent research and new results on digital libraries. As usual, the Yearbook 2001 also contains a variety of papers on other subjects relevant to medical informatics, such as Electronic Patient Records, Health Information Systems, Health and Clinical Management, Decision Support Systems, Education, as well as Image and Signal Processing. This paper will briefly introduce the contributions covering digital libraries and will show how medical informatics research contributes to this important topic.

Humans↗

Challenges in medical informatics: perspectives of an international medical informatics organization.

OBJECTIVE: As an international organization with the missions to promote informatics in health care and biomedical research, advance international cooperation, stimulate research, development and education, and disseminate and exchange information, the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) must be constantly cognizant of new developments in medical informatics and address the challenges to the discipline. From an international organization standpoint, it perceives three major challenges viz. the Identity, Organizational and Leadership challenges. METHOD: This paper attempts to identify and discuss these challenges and to offer ways to overcome them through the activities of an international organization for medical informatics. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: From an international organization standpoint, IMIA can help overcome these organizational challenges by ensuring strong leadership throughout its echelon, actively promoting its goals and objectives worldwide through its national and institutional members as well as its regional groups and encouraging strategic partnerships between its many Working Groups and Special Interest Group on Nursing with other international organizations and industry to further promote the awareness and the perception of the relevance of medical informatics to health and medicine by the international community.

International Cooperation↗

Health informatics world wide--a WWW service for the health informatics community.

Health Informatics World Wide, a Web index of research and educational institutions in the fields of Health Informatics and Medical Informatics has been available to WWW users since 1995. In this paper we report on the original conception of this service, its subsequent modifications and address its maintenance and related problems. Access statistics are presented which demonstrate its relevance as well as the geographical focus of Health Informatics research and development.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Informatics competencies pre-and post-implementation of a Palm-based student clinical log and informatics for evidence-based practice curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation and evaluation of a two-part approach to achieving informatics competencies: 1) Palm-based student clinical log for documentation of patient encounters; and 2) informatics for evidence-based practice curriculum. Using a repeated-measures, non-equivalent control group design, self-reported informatics competencies were rated using a survey instrument based upon published informatics competencies for beginning nurses. For the class of 2002, scores increased significantly in all competencies from admission to graduation. Using a minimum score of 3 on a scale of 1=not competent and 5=expert to indicate competence, the only area in which it was not achieved was Computer Skills: Education. For 2001 graduates, Computer Skills: Decision Support was also below 3. There were no significant differences in competency scores between 2001 and 2002 graduates. Computer Skills: Decision Support neared significance. Subsequently, the approaches were refined for implementation in the class of 2003.

Computer Literacy↗

Medical informatics at Heidelberg/Heilbronn: status-evaluation-new challenges in a specialised curriculum for medical informatics after thirty years of evolution.

After reporting on characteristics, structure and contents of the specialised informatics-based curriculum for medical informatics (MI) at the University of Heidelberg/University of Applied Sciences Heilbronn, the paper describes the development during the last 5 years, and in particular a complementary health care oriented postgraduate program in 'Health Information Management' (IM). Furthermore, it outlines results of a study among the MI graduates, which aims to assess their job situation and to evaluate the curriculum from their viewpoint and so establishes a summary of 30 years of experience with the program. Finally, the paper discusses new challenges of the program, considering the results of the study, perspectives of health care provision in the next decade, content changes to be focused on and the growing competition in the field of programs for medical informatics.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗

Informatics united: exemplary studies combining medical informatics, neuroinformatics and bioinformatics.

OBJECTIVES: Medical informatics, neuroinformatics and bioinformatics provide a wide spectrum of research. Here, we show the great potential of synergies between these research areas on the basis of four exemplary studies where techniques are transferred from one of the disciplines to the other. METHODS: Reviewing and analyzing exemplary and specific projects at the intersection of medical informatics, neuroinformatics, and bioinformatics from our experience in an interdisciplinary research group. RESULTS: Synergy emerges when techniques and solutions from medical informatics, bioinformatics, or neuroinformatics are successfully applied in one of the other disciplines. Synergy was found in 1. the modeling of neurophysiological systems for medical therapy development, 2. the use of image processing techniques from medical computer vision for the analysis of the dynamics of cell nuclei, and 3. the application of neuroinformatics tools for data mining in bioinformatics and as classifiers in clinical oncology. CONCLUSIONS: Each of the three different disciplines have delivered technologies that are readily applicable in the other disciplines. The mutual transfer of knowledge and techniques proved to increase efficiency and accuracy in a manifold of applications. In particular, we expect that clinical decision support systems based on techniques derived from neuro- and bioinformatics have the potential to improve medical diagnostics and will finally lead to a personalized delivery of healthcare.

Computational Biology↗

Clinical informatics and the dental curriculum. A review of the impact of informatics in dental care, its implications for dental education.

The origins of informatics lie in the development of computers and data processing techniques since the 1950s. The subsequent application of these to the practice of healthcare continues to the present day, so that information technology now holds the potential to revolutionise healthcare through more rapid and efficient management of an ever increasing quantity of clinical information. In dentistry, no less than in medicine, electronic systems can make an extremely valuable contribution to clinical practice. For these systems to be clinically useful, however, they need to be properly understood by clinicians. This review paper outlines the scope of clinical informatics and argues that a grounding in clinical informatics is now essential for today's undergraduates to equip them to meet the challenge of practice in the 21st century.

Computer Communication Networks↗

Consumer health informatics: a consensus description and commentary from American Medical Informatics Association members.

BACKGROUND: Although interest in Consumer Health Informatics (CHI) has increased, a consensus definition of CHI does not yet exist. PURPOSE: To conduct a hypothesis-generating survey of AMIA members regarding definition and research agenda for CHI. METHODS: We solicited participation among AMIA members in an Internet-based survey focusing on issues related to a definition of CHI. RESULTS: One hundred thirty-five AMIA members responded. Participants indicated a broad spectrum of topics important to CHI including "self-help for disease management" and "patient access to their own medical records." CHI research was felt to rely heavily on public health methods such as epidemiology and outcomes research, a paradigm shift from traditional medical informatics. Responses indicated a perceived lack of funding and need for further research in CHI. CONCLUSIONS: A working definition should emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of CHI, include consumer input into CHI design, and focus on public health approaches to evaluation.

Community Participation↗

The Informatics Collaboratory: building an online community to support health care informatics students.

For the past decade, the School of Nursing has examined the role of computer mediated communication and virtual environments in both health care and educational systems. This recent project, the I-Collaboratory, draws upon previous work and builds on recent studies examining the role of social presence in learning communities. The I-Collaboratory creates a virtual infrastructure to support a collaborative learning environment for Master level students in a web-based health care informatics program. This innovative and supportive environment allows students to learn through collaborative inter-actions and have access to a cadre of professionals associated with nursing, informatics and health care. This paper provides an introduction to the concept of a collaboratory and describes the set of principles derived from the literature that serve as a foundation. The process of selecting a web-based platform and the development of the online community based on the results of a need assessment is also detailed. The paper concludes with an outline of the online community components and the plans for evaluation.

Cooperative Behavior↗

Twenty years medical informatics education at Heidelberg/Heilbronn: evolution of a specialized curriculum for medical informatics.

The medical informatics curriculum at University of Heidelberg/School of Technology Heilbronn started in 1972 as a specialized university curriculum. In this paper, we report on 20 years of experience and the evolution of this educational approach with respect to structure and content of the curriculum. We emphasize that this evolution parallels the development of medical informatics to a medical discipline in its own right, with distinct application domains and specific methodological approaches. Based on our experience and on recommendations from the national and international community, we describe and discuss the features of the curriculum.

Curriculum↗

Using informatics principles and tools to harness research evidence for patient care: evidence-based informatics.

With the huge worldwide investment in biomedical research during the past 50 years, there are many important advances in health care knowledge each year. Unfortunately, it commonly takes over 20 years for even the most important of these advances to be widely integrated into clinical practice. Many potentially remediable factors are responsible for this dilemma in research transfer, including defective continuing education for health professionals and patients; increasingly complex medical regimens; diminishing resources for health care; and inadequate evidence management. The principles and procedures of health informatics can help overcome some of these barriers to research transfer, particularly such evidence management tasks as retrieving, processing, summarizing, disseminating and applying evidence for clinical care. Evidence retrieval has been improved by better indexing and electronic search engines, by improved access from clinical and other settings, and by integration of evidence into clinical decision support systems. Evidence processing has been greatly accelerated by streamlined methods of critical appraisal of research and by centralization of these procedures for the development of current awareness publications and cumulative "best evidence" databases. The Cochrane Collaboration has revolutionized the summarization (systematic review) of evidence. The internet has provided access to patients, practitioners, and policy makers, alike. Direct-from-patient automated data collection promises to move the connection between evidence and practice to a higher level. In all of these innovations, health care practice is most likely to be enhanced by intertwining best evidence with best informatics techniques.

Databases as Topic↗

Twenty five years of medical informatics education at Heidelberg/Heilbronn: discussion of a specialized curriculum for medical informatics.

The specialized university curriculum for medical informatics (MI) at the University of Heidelberg/School of Technology Heilbronn is one of the oldest educational approaches in the field of MI and has been successful now for 25 years with about 1000 graduates (Diplom-Informatikerin der Medizin or Diplom-Informatiker der Medizin). It belongs to the category of dedicated master's programs for MI and is based on the concept of MI as a medical discipline of its own. It is oriented towards the total spectrum of MI ranging from health care economics, biosignal and medical image processing, medical documentation, to information and knowledge processing in medicine. It is a 4.5 years program with a strong emphasis on the methodological foundations of MI and on practical education in a number of specific laboratories. A total of 35 students are admitted each semester and in total about 440 students are enrolled. The faculty consists of 17 full-time members and about 25 part-time lecturers. The authors report on characteristics, structure and contents of the new fifth version of the curriculum and discuss the features of a specialized curriculum for MI with respect to the challenges for MI in the 21st century.

Artificial Intelligence↗

Medical informatics on the Internet: creating the sci.med. informatics newsgroup.

A Usenet newsgroup, sci.med.informatics, has been created to serve as an international electronic forum for discussion of issues related to medical informatics. The creation process follows a set of administrative rules set out by the Usenet administration on the Internet and consists of five steps: 1) informal discussion, 2) request for formal discussion, 3) formal discussion, 4) voting, and 5) posting of results. The newsgroup can be accessed using any news reader via the Internet.

Communication↗

Role of clinical trials informatics in the NCI's cancer informatics infrastructure.

A Web-enabled Cancer Informatics Infrastructure (CII) will enable faster, better clinical trials, ultimately improving cancer care. To create the CII, the National Cancer Institute is forming public-private partnerships and building on existing activities. Key innovations include development of standards for cancer patient information and clinical research, management of patients using disease specific "clinical states" and use of drag and drop electronic protocol authoring.

Breast Neoplasms↗