Course description

Course lay-out

This is the third course in the serie of healthcare information courses. The course will elaborate about registrations and classifications and the juridical aspects & law which are closely related to the first two topics mentioned here. The course starts with the organization and purpose of medical registries. Several local, national and international registries will be discussed. A lot of attention will be paid to Medical Informatics methods and techniques which can be used to acquire large amounts of data out of registries to transform it into knowledge and information in favor of management, research and the healthcare process. Patient empowerment, patient information on the internet and tele-medicine are also topics that will be discussed in this course.

 

Registries and information systems can contain sensitive information. Juridical aspects and laws will be extensively discussed in this course. The law guarantees the privacy of the patient and patient access to their own data. The value of registries and information systems increases when the data stored in it is structured and clearly defined. Terminology systems play a role in this. Terminology systems will be discussed along with its value and problems.

 

Educational goals

At the end of this course the student has acquired knowledge of and insight into:

• organisation of medical registries and their relationship with healthcare policy
• usage and analysis possibilities of medical registries
• data quality in medical registries and information systems
• medical record linkage
• benchmarking and case-mix correction
• laws and juridical aspects regarding registration of medical data
• E-health, tele-medicine and patient information on the internet
• medical terminology systems and classifications
• structure, domain and practical usage of terminology systems and classifications
• formalisms for representing knowledge of terminology systems and classifications
• DTC's in favor of financing the healthcare
• diagnostic classification in humanity care

 

Involved departments

• Clinical Informatics
• GP Medicine
• Guest Lecturers
• Health Education Science
• Social Medicine

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

This course was all about registration and classification. A lot of different topics were discussed, so we received a scheme. The scheme gave an overview of how all topics were related to each other and when which topic was adressed and discussed. This scheme was very useful. The six assignments that have to be done were also very useful to get familiar with all the topics. All these assignments had to be done in groups. The first assignment was the most work, writing an academic paper. It was also the most difficult assignment, but I passed the assignment the first time. All the other assignments dealt with a particular topic. By doing these assignments the theory became more interesting and showed application possibilities of the several topics. The most interesting assignment was to setup a registration and what you have to account for during the setup and when the registration is available. You have to account for a lot more things, than you could imagine in the first place. It was interesting how to tackle this assignment and present the final result. Another assignment that was interesting was the medical record linkage assignment. The practical gave a clear insight into medical record linkage and we had to merge two separate databases. We had to choose some linkage variables and finally you saw how many records were connected. It was interesting to hear some guest lecturers about their field & work and lectures about registries which are managed by the department clinical informatics; particularly interesting was the BHN registry which has been created by the clinical informatics department.