Abstract: Requirements and approaches of Software Engineering education in the field of Medical Informatics are described with respect to the impact of (1) experiences characterizing the “software misery”, (2) status and tendencies in software methodology, and (3) educational status and needs in computer science education influenced by the controversy “theoretical versus practical education”. Special attention is directed toward the growing importance of analysis, design methods, and techniques in the professional spectrum of Medical Informatics, the relevance of general principles of systems engineering in health care, the potential of non-procedural programming paradigms, and the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and education. Realizations of and experiences with programs in the field of Software Engineering are reported with respect to special requirements in Medical Informatics.
Most of the computer-based assessment software available is web-based. While there are many advantages, for instance the possibility to use the same software for learning and assessment, there are legal and technical risks with this approach such as a network failure or the missing proof for the correctness of the collected data. Therefore a new software was developed at the Heidelberg University Hospital focusing on fault-tolerance and certainty of law. It uses a client-server architecture for real-time result display but through using different layers of logging a failure of the server will neither end the test nor any data will be lost. The system has been used for testing students of medicine at the Heidelberg University Hospital since the end of 2004.
Health and medical informatics (HMI) is an evolving discipline. Therefore, evolving educational programs in HMI have to take a variety of requirements into account. The aim of this paper is to analyze these requirements and to compare them with the medical informatics program Heidelberg/Heilbronn, Germany.Systematic analysis of the IMIA recommendations on educating HMI, the Bologna declaration, current technological and health care developments and the results of graduates surveys.The latest revision of the Heidelberg/Heilbronn medical informatics program not only takes current developments into account but also realizes the IMIA recommendations, the Bologna declaration and graduates' data and feedback obtained in structured surveys. The topics bioinformatics, IT security and telemedicine were strengthened, taking major research and application trends into account. The program has been transformed into a consecutive bachelor/master program. It qualifies its graduates to work in the field of medical informatics as well as in informatics.Medical informatics is a very broad field. Programs have to make concessions to scope: It is not possible to provide profound knowledge and skills in computer science and also teach a variety of application areas like bioinformatics, public health informatics and clinical informatics in depth within one medical informatics program. Many graduate programs in various nations concentrate on providing HMI skills to health care professionals.
Care for patients is the best way to learn medicine and medical methods and skills. But the availability of real patients for learners is limited. Often the appropriate patient is missed or he can not be demonstrated to all students because of practical or ethical problems. A possible solution is the presentation of a clinical problem by a virtual patient using a simulative computer program. But such an approach means often a lot of work for the author of the case. We developed a flexible and realistic system, CAMPUS (www.medicase.de), which supports the case authors with appropriate vocabularies and a comfortable authoring tool. There are different kinds of case presentations to the users in accordance to the level of professionalism of the user and the scenario the program is used in. An evaluation within an internship has shown, that such pro-grams are judged as useful by medical students. But further studies are necessary to examine if the program will be used for the self-study and to develop further kinds of using scenarios within problem-based curricula.
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.
Abstract: Health and medical informatics education has meanwhile gained considerable importance for medicine and for health care. Specialized programs in health/medical informatics have therefore been established within the last decades. This special issue of Methods of Information in Medicine contains papers on health and medical informatics education. It is mainly based on selected papers from the 5th Working Conference on Health/Medical Informatics Education of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), which was held in September 1992 at the University of Heidelberg/Technical School Heilbronn, Germany, as part of the 20 years’ celebration of medical informatics education at Heidelberg/Heilbronn. Some papers were presented on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the health information science program of the School of Health Information Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Within this issue, programs in health/medical informatics are presented and analyzed: the medical informatics program at the University of Utah, the medical informatics program of the University of Heidelberg/School of Technology Heilbronn, the health information science program at the University of Victoria, the health informatics program at the University of Minnesota, the health informatics management program at the University of Manchester, and the health information management program at the University of Alabama. They all have in common that they are dedicated curricula in health/medical informatics which are university-based, leading to an academic degree in this field. In addition, views and recommendations for health/medical informatics education are presented. Finally, the question is discussed, whether health and medical informatics can be regarded as a separate discipline with the necessity for specialized curricula in this field. In accordance with the aims of IMIA, the intention of this special issue is to promote the further development of health and medical informatics education in order to contribute to high quality health care and medical research.
