On Teaching International Courses on Health Information Systems. Lessons Learned during 16 Years of Frank - van Swieten Lectures on Strategic Information Management in Health Information Systems

Reflections Towards the Future of Medical Informatics

OBJECTIVE

To provide guidance on the future development and role of medical informatics, or biomedical and health informatics, in form of reflections.

METHOD

To report on the author's previous activities as a medical informatician, which spans almost half a century. It began in 1973 when he started to study medical informatics. In 1978, more than four decades ago, his professional work started. He retired at the end of summer semester 2021. This was the occasion to prepare this farewell lecture.

RESULTS

In twenty reflections, thoughts are presented on professional careers (R1 - 'places'), on medical informatics as discipline (R2 - 'interdisciplinarity', R3 - 'focuses', R4 - 'affiliations'), on research (R5 - 'duality', R6 - 'confluences', R7 - 'correlations', R8 - 'collaboration'), on education (R9 - 'community', R10 - 'competencies', R11 - 'approaches'), on academic self-governance (R12 - 'autonomy'), on engagement (R13 - 'Sisyphos', R14 - 'professional societies', R15 - 'respect', R16 - 'tightrope walk'), and on good scientific practice (R17 - 'time invariants', R18 - 'Zeitgeist', R19 - 'knowledge gain', R20 - 'exercising').

CONCLUSIONS

It has been a pleasure for me to participate in medical informatics activities for almost fifty years. During that time, there have been significant advances, including in medicine and in informatics, and also in medical informatics itself. And now it is the turn of others. While keeping in mind that tradition is not preserving the ashes, but passing on the fire, this report with its reflections may be of some help.

The Effectiveness of Hands-on Health Informatics Skills Exercises in the Multidisciplinary Smart Home Healthcare and Health Informatics Training Laboratories

OBJECTIVE

This article aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of newly established innovative smart home healthcare and health informatics laboratories, and a novel laboratory course that focuses on experiential health informatics training, and determine students' self-confidence to operate wireless home health monitoring devices before and after the hands-on laboratory course.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Two web-based pretraining and posttraining questionnaires were sent to 64 students who received hands-on training with wireless remote patient monitoring devices in smart home healthcare and health informatics laboratories.

RESULTS

All 64 students completed the pretraining survey (100% response rate), and 49 students completed the posttraining survey (76% response rate). The quantitative data analysis showed that 95% of students had an interest in taking more hands-on laboratory courses. Sixty-seven percent of students had no prior experience with medical image, physiological data acquisition, storage, and transmission protocols. After the hands-on training session, 75.51% of students expressed improved confidence about training patients to measure blood pressure monitor using wireless devices. Ninety percent of students preferred to use a similar experiential approach in their future learning experience. Additionally, the qualitative data analysis demonstrated that students were expecting to have more courses with hands-on exercises and integration of technology-enabled delivery and patient monitoring concepts into the curriculum.

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrated that the multidisciplinary smart home healthcare and health informatics training laboratories and the hands-on exercises improved students' technology adoption rates and their self-confidence in using wireless patient monitoring devices.

Should Degree Programs in Biomedical and Health Informatics be Dedicated or Integrated? : Reflections and Recommendations after more than 40 Years of Medical Informatics Education at TU Braunschweig, including 10 Years of B.Sc. and 15 Years of M.Sc. Integrated Degree Curricula

Education in biomedical and health informatics (BMHI) has been established in many countries throughout the world. For degree programs in BMHI we can distinguish between those that are completely stand-alone or dedicated to the discipline vs. those that are integrated within another program. After running integrated degree medical informatics programs at TU Braunschweig for 10 years at the B.Sc. and for 15 years at the M.Sc level, we (1) report about this educational approach, (2) analyze recommendations on, implementations of, and experiences with degree educational programs in BMHI worldwide, (3) summarize our lessons learned with the integrated approach at TU Braunschweig, and (4) suggest an answer to the question, whether degree programs in biomedical and health informatics should be dedicated or integrated. According to our experience at TU Braunschweig and based on our analysis of publications, there is a clear dominance of dedicated degree programs in BMHI. The specialization in medical informatics within a computer science program, as offered at TU Braunschweig, may be a good way of implementing an integrated, informatics-based approach to medical informatics, in particular if a dual degree option can be chosen. The option of curricula leading to double degrees, i.e. in this case to two separate degrees in computer science and in medical informatics might, however, be a better solution.