Objectives

Introduction to
Biomedical & Health Informatics
MEDED 530, Fall, '04

Philosophy:

The goal of this course is to work together as a team to improve our knowledge of the scope and breadth of the field of biomedical informatics.

Because this is a graduate-level course, I expect students to be self-motivated, and be willing to look beyond the "minimum requirements" of assignments and textbook readings. At the research and graduate level, there are often questions that do not have a simple "right" or "wrong" answers. I also expect that you will understand that I am not an oracle for providing answers -- more like a team leader that can help us find answers.

Because my focus is on the research questions for the field, I will be heavily augmenting the textbook readings with articles from the primary literature. I hope you'll find these to be complementary to your text.

Finally, I expect you all to be "adult learners". Thus, my teaching style will be to encourage discussion and participation in the learning process, rather than simply to provide plain lecture-style teaching.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the course, you should be able to...

Define the breadth and scope of biomedical informatics. As a sub-goal, delineate and describe the four UW foundational research areas in informatics and the application areas in which they might be applied
Describe the unique aspects of healthcare and the health sciences that create unique information management and technology needs
Understand why the field is inherently multi-disciplinary, and includes connections to fields such as Computer Science, Information Science, Decision theory, etc.
Understand the open challenges in the field, and some of its historical successes and failures

Last Updated:
Sept 27, '04

Contact the instructor at: gennari@u.washington.edu