Master of Professional Studies: Health IT

Required Core Courses (18 credits):

HIT 658: Health Informatics I

As the first required course in the series, Health Informatics I starts with introductory topics and proceeds with an overview of the essential topics of Health IT. Consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of Health IT, the course touches people and organizational aspects of health information systems as well as technology. While covering the essentials of Health Informatics, the course also achieves depth by engaging students in a semester- long study of a particular topic in Health IT. Some of the topics covered in this course include electronic health records, practice management, health information exchange, data standards, consumer health informatics and mobile health.

HIT 663: Health IT Policy and Administration

This course provides a comprehensive overview on the policy and administration of health information technology. Students will develop an understanding of the management principles in the American healthcare delivery system, including the roles of patients, third party insurance payers, and healthcare professionals. The course will also include health care policy in the US with specific examples from Medicare, Medicaid and ongoing efforts for healthcare reform.

HIT 664: Health IT Law and Ethics

This course provides a comprehensive overview of important legal principles affecting health information technology and management, with a focus on the intersection of these legal principles with business ethics. The student will learn how to think through and process legal problems consistent with ethical norms, and how to analyze business risks in light of operative legal constructs, taking into consideration ethical issues, to arrive at a range of correct business decisions. Throughout the class the student will learn substantive legal principles including an overview of constitutional, contract, tort, corporate and regulatory law. Students will work in groups during certain exercises, role play in real and hypothetical case studies, and make a final presentation of a comprehensive legal and ethical health IT problem.

HIT 750: Data Analytics

This course covers large-scale analytics for health care. The course will start with an overview of data mining techniques including classification, clustering, association rule mining, anomaly detection, and data visualization. These techniques will be covered in the context of healthcare data such as electronic medical records. This course will address the challenges of analyzing healthcare data, and integration strategies for various data types commonly found in electronic medical records as well as genomic, environmental, and biological data that affect healthcare.

HIT 759: Health Informatics II

As the second required course in the health informatics series, Health Informatics II extends the coverage of the health informatics issues into areas such as online medical resources and search engines, evidence-based medicine and clinical practice guidelines, disease management, disease registries and quality improvement, patient safety and health IT, electronic prescribing, telemedicine, and bioinformatics.

Prerequisite: Health Informatics I.

HIT 760: Health Informatics Capstone

The Capstone project provides an opportunity for students to carry out an individual piece of supervised research or a project activity on a specified topic in the Health Informatics domain. The final project should make an original contribution to the body of knowledge in the profession or otherwise demonstrate core competencies in Health IT and Informatics. Students must also have a total of 21 credits in the program to register for this course.

Elective Health Information Technology Courses (12 credits)

Choose 4

HIT 674: Process & Quality Improvement with Health IT

This course provides an overview of quality measurement and process improvement as they relate specifically to the health care industry. The course will focus on the tools, techniques, and resources available to health care professionals through effective use of health IT. Students will learn how to create quality benchmarks, gather data, and analyze results. They will learn how to design specific processes that directly address analytical findings and have the potential to improve outcomes. Students will understand a variety of implementation strategies for new processes, and be able to use health IT and other tools to measure the overall effectiveness. They will also learn how to prioritize improvement efforts across complicated business and practice systems. Students will work in groups during certain exercises, explore real and hypothetical case studies, and make a final presentation of an improvement process and implementation which utilizes health IT as their course project.

HIT 723: Public Health Informatics

This course will cover the key components of public health practice, and include topics such as disease surveillance, outbreak, detection, investigation, vital records, and dissemination of information. The course will include data collection, data analysis, data cleaning, ways to provide data to customers, improve data quality and access to care, and develop and evaluate interventions. Students will develop an understanding of the use of IT to support public health practice, increase individual effectiveness, and improve the effectiveness of the public health enterprise.

HIT 751: Introduction to Healthcare Databases

This graduate level course provides an introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of creating and maintaining databases within a healthcare setting. This is a beginner’s course and no previous programming or technical experience is required. Topics include: relational databases, normalization, data integrity, database design, data querying, and data forms/reports. The class includes applied lab and project components to provide hands-on experience with creating and maintaining databases; using Access and SQLite as our database systems. This course is intended for students interested in databases within the context of healthcare informatics, health information technology, and healthcare.

IS 610: Database Program Development

An introduction to computer databases that examines the basic functions and capabilities of database management software (DBMS). Emphasis is placed on using this software to solve information processing problems, which may include laboratory work as well as database design case studies. Topics include a discussion of data structures, host language programming; indirect and direct file organization and DBMS models, including hierarchical, network and relational. Also examined are storage devices, data administration and database administration, as well as database analysis, design and implementation. Note: May not be taken for credit in IS graduate degree programs.

ENMG 652: Management Leadership and Communications

Students learn effective management and communication skills through case study-analysis, reading, class discussion and role-playing. The course covers topics such as effective listening, setting expectations, delegation, coaching, performance, evaluations, conflict management, and negotiation with senior management and managing with integrity.

Additional Elective

Choose from other available electives to complete the requirements for this program