Welcome to the specialization on health informatics. My name is Harold Lehmann. I'm Professor and Director of the Division of Health Sciences Informatics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. With me is. Hello everyone. My name is Ashwini Davidson. I'm an Assistant Professor in General Internal Medicine and the Associate Director of Education for the Division of Health Sciences Informatics. We're so excited to have you be a part of our specialization. We think you'll really enjoy it. Healthcare is huge. It's a huge part of the economy. It's takes a lot of effort. You're going to be a patient. Your family is going to be patients. You're going to be living in this feature that we're developing as we speak. But the interesting thing is that healthcare is just not as computer-involved as other industries. You all know. You'll use computers for airline reservations, and for purchasing, and for movies, but not for health. It's really interesting Harold as you're talking about this historical approach of this encounter-based medicine and moving towards a time period where perhaps it focuses around the patient. It's not just what happens in the clinic. It's not just what happens in front of the provider, what gets told to them every three months or every year, but what's happening 24/7 around the clock with the patient. We're seeing great advances, and increased adoption, and this desire for patient engagement, but it's not so easy. There are problems that can occur. We have studies that show that 50 percent of time is spent on desktop medicine these days rather than actual patient care. It's quite amazing. Right. It tells us that those of us in the field for a long time have been waiting for this day to find that. It's finally here, and yet patients are suffering. The physicians are suffering. There's a lot of work to be done to fix the system even as we're in a great position right now. You were saying a lot about the patient, and yet with all these tools, we can go beyond the patient. So, we can talk about the population of patients. We can talk about patients at risk. We can talk about patients in general, we can talk about patients or people. These are all things that we could only dream about before we had all these computer tools. As informaticians, we're the ones that are often bridging the divide between the clinical experts and the technical experts, and being the ones who's that liaison, being the one who's translating things. We hope through the course of this specialization, you develop some of those skills and really develop a hunger to learn even more. There's a huge demand, not enough of a supply of skilled informaticians. I can just say that the environment is hungry for people who know informatics. I think we should take a moment Harold to step back and actually talk about what exactly informatics is. A one-liner I'd like to give basically is that health IT is what you can do. Informatics is what you should do. Yeah. One of the things that I think is so exciting about informatics is that there are different disciplines within it. You will get to hear during the course of the specialization about, of course, clinical informatics, public health informatics, population health informatics, consumer health informatics, there's imaging informatics, nursing informatics. The list goes on. Now we'd like to tell you how we decided on the content that's going to make up this five-course specialization. The first principle is that we should be consistent with standards because that's what informaticians do. There are standards for competencies informatics that we use in getting our master's degrees accredited. So, that's one principle we are using. The second principle is lessons that we've learned from the eight years that we've had our graduate degree programs at the Division of Health Sciences Informatics. One of those lessons is a framework that we've developed as part of the curriculum. We've both tested it over the years. We've been published on it, and it will frame the specialization as a whole. The basic idea is that you want to first make sure that you understand the context of where your informatics interventions are going to be. The second is that you want to understand how what you're doing is going to support that. The third is how it all goes, how it fits together. What Dr. Lehmann is referring to right there is the Informatics Stack, and it's something that you're going to be introduced to in Course One. So, why don't you tell us a little bit more about Course One, Dr. Lehmann? So, the Course One is the overall introduction, gives you the basics of the stack business, why do you care about it, what is it, how to use it, as well as what are the drivers of informatics today, both economically and from healthcare. So, that's where we get to you and your course, where we have to understand what the organization is, what the workflow is and how that can screw things up. Yeah. Exactly. So, in the second course, students are going to get some strategies for successfully leading change in health informatics. Then we get to Course Three, Harold. So, there, you understand where you're going. Now you actually have to do something. So, what is it that you're designing? How do you design it? Then in our last course, we deal with the data that goes into all these systems. You may remember that informatics is about data information and knowledge. So, finally, we have to give you some data. You have to get your hands on some of these real nitty-gritty details. Yeah. It's really going to be a great time to roll up your sleeves and not just learn about the common data types but gain some experience. Speaking you're rolling your sleeves up. That brings us to Course Five. This is the culminating project and should be a really good opportunity for you to apply some of the principles you've learned about in Course One, Two, Three, and Four. Our real goal for you is that you'll end up with something concrete that you can show potential employers, admissions committees, and something that you'll be proud of. Absolutely. Again, welcome to our specialization. Really glad to have you here.
