Project Summary
Clinical informatics is the discipline at the intersection of healthcare and information technologies that seeks to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare systems across the globe through the rational incorporation of information technologies to patient care.
To harness the power of health information technologies and understand their impact on patients, clinicians and health systems, health care professionals need to develop professional competencies in clinical informatics and how the discipline can help:
a) identify relevant healthcare issues,
b) collect and analyze routinely collected clinical data to describe problems and envision solutions,
c) design and validate digital solutions, and
d) successfully implement and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed digital solutions using routinely collected clinical data.
This virtuous cycle is what we call the Learning Healthcare System, and it has been proposed as a continuous improvement cycle, based on digital technologies, capable of transforming the ways we deliver healthcare services.
For this project, we propose to develop and evaluate a series of online training modules for health sciences students that introduce them to the core competencies in clinical informatics and using the Learning Healthcare System as the underpinning framework. The training modules will allow health sciences students develop the necessary competencies to understand the role and limitations of health information technologies to transform the delivery of healthcare. This includes the meaningful adoption of electronic healthcare records, clinical decision support systems, digital tools for quality improvement, telehealth, and other virtual models of care and patient engagement such as smartphone applications and sensors.
The course will be organized in several modules:
Module 1: The Learning Healthcare System: the challenges of delivering high-quality healthcare and the limits of human cognition.
Module 2. Identifying and describing clinical problems through data analytics.
Module 3. Digital Health interventions: electronic health records, clinical decision support systems, telehealth and other virtual models of care
Module 4. Designing digital health solutions: Patient participation and human centered design.
Module 5. Behavioral change: digital ‘nudges’ can help clinicians and patients do the right thing
Module 6. Implementation sciences
Module 7. Ethical and legal challenges, unintended consequences of digital health technologies.
To foster authentic learning experiences, stories of real-world digital transformations will be used in each of the modules to illustrate key concepts.
This proposal will generate resources that will be shared across all three partner universities and tailored to provide both a local and a global perspective of the discipline, thus advancing U21 goal of sharing information that drives global learning. The resources developed will equip our students with the necessary tools to own the digital transformation of health and use these tools to improve patient care across the globe.
Who’s involved?
Lead University: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Viviana Torres/Eric Rojas
Partner Universities:
University of Melbourne
Tecnológico de Monterrey