HIT 722 - Exploration of Clinician Information Needs

[3]

This course offers students the opportunity to learn the domain knowledge necessary to understand information needs that arise for clinicians. Students will examine research on the topic of “clinician information needs”, with particular relation to needs that occur while using clinical information systems. We will also examine methodologies for identifying, and resolving, information needs. The course will focus on emerging technology for decision support, including ¿infobuttons¿, which are context-aware links from any application to some on-line information resource. In particular, when they are placed in electronic health records (EHRs) they are considered by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to be a form of ¿meaningful use¿ of the EHR. An infobutton can be as simple as a link from a drug order entry application to a relevant drug monograph or as complex as an expert system that extracts relevant data about the patient in question, anticipates unanswered information needs and retrieves knowledge to addressing those needs. Other forms of decision support, including knowledge resources, expert systems and alerting systems may also be explored during the course, depending on student interest. The course will involve discussion of publications on information needs and research on resolving them, as well as project work. Topics will include the history clinical decision support, history of infobuttons, infobutton managers, the HL7 infobutton standard, open access infobutton systems, the use of ontologies to leverage clinical data for information retrieval functions, and evaluation of clinical decision support.