AIDA and medical courseware.
For more than a decade the Department of Medical Informatics has offered one-week training courses on the subject of computer applications in medicine and health care. Since 1983 two courses are given at a rate of one course every two weeks. One course is on programming and problem solving and consists of three modules of increasing complexity in techniques and methods in programming and structured system development. This course focusses on only some aspects of medical informatics: the development of a medical information system, and the problems occurring in the process of automation. These aspects, however, are dealt with in detail. To this end the students are trained in using the programming system MUMPS and the fourth-generation software package AIDA. The second, introductory course is an intensive training on several distinct areas of man-machine interactions. It contains lessons in the fields of communication and recording; storage and retrieval and databases; computation and automation; recognition and diagnosis; and therapy and control. This paper describes the use of AIDA in developing and maintaining lessons for the latter course, and the assistance of AIDA for teaching purposes in the former course.