Overview
Back to Health Informatics
The IUPUI campus is uniquely suited to conduct education in health informatics through its health schools, research centers, and affiliated academic units. The School of Medicine has a long history of fellowship training and research in medical informatics. The internationally recognized Regenstrief Institute for Health Care conducts health services and medical informatics research. The Regenstrief Medical Record System (RMRS) is one of the largest (200 million results), longest continually operating (26 years) electronic medical record systems in the world. The computer now continually reviews its medical record content and influences care by reminding care givers about clinical circumstances that require action.
Researchers at the Regenstrief Institute performed the first randomized trial of a computer reminder system, and have produced a major share of the world's literature on such computer reminder systems. It unifies vast amounts of clinical data from many information sources for patient care and to research best clinical practices, and the institute is now developing a set of city-wide medical record vaults that can be opened under prescribed circumstances for emergency care. Projects underway include physician order entry, voice understanding, Web-based clinical entry systems, and the capture and display of compressed radiology images and motion cardiac echograms.
Most recently, through funding by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Library of Medicine, and the John A. Hartford Foundation, Regenstrief led a national team in developing the Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) database. When fully implemented, this research will have standardized the coding of laboratory tests and other clinical measurements. It is now used by all of the largest clinical laboratories, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for cancer registries and communicable disease reporting, and it may be part of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standard for Claims Attachments.
The database will be useful to a multitude of health care agencies including hospitals, clinical laboratories, physicians' organizations, state health departments, governmental health care providers, third party payers, organizations involved in clinical trials, and quality assurance and utilization reviewers.
The School of Informatics offers an undergraduate degree in health information administration. This baccalaureate program prepares professionals to plan and manage health information systems. The curriculum is grounded in computer systems, health law, clinical documentation, coding and classification systems, healthcare reimbursement and organizational management. The School of Informatics developed a Master of Science in Health Informatics to help meet the critical need for increasing breadth and depth in the areas of the computerized patient record and integrated health information systems.
The School of Nursing, which is the largest in the country, is in the forefront nationally in the development of nursing informatics. The school's strategic objectives are congruent with the objectives of the proposed M.S. in Health Informatics, particularly in the area of knowledge-based health care information. For example, graduate courses in nursing informatics would train students to select and implement health information management systems, as well as to use the knowledge supplied by these systems effectively. Applications of these systems would focus on patient education, clinical practice, and research.
Other schools and academic departments offer critical resources for health informatics. The School of Library and Information Science offers, among others, master's and doctoral degrees in information science, which are distinguished by their sociotechnical orientation. SLIS also has a broad research thrust exploring the interconnection of social, behavioral, and technological issues associated with the use of information and communication technologies.
The Department of Computer & Information Science offers a M.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in databases and data mining and other research areas. Through this program and other related ones, the department has faculty and research resources that would support critical computer science requirements of the M.S. in Health Informatics. Moreover, faculty in the department are externally funded to conduct research in medical informatics and bioinformatics.
In addition to the above offerings, academic programs at Indianapolis in public health, applied health sciences, and hospital administration offer important supporting coursework.
