Course description

Course lay-out

1. Management of care processes

• Elementary organisational science & business economics
• Organisation, structure and functioning of hospitals
• Modelling/analysing decision processes in favor of policy and management

2. Policy, management, financing and the structure & organisation of the healthcare

• Internal financing (meso)
• External financing (macro)
• Policy with regard to public health and healthcare

3. Medical ethics and medical law

• Medical ethics

4. Patient flows; complaint, morbidity and mortality patterns

• Complaint, morbidity and mortality patterns (macro)
• Patient flows and patient care chains

5. Medical decision making and evidence-based medicine (macro)

6. Clinical decision support and knowledge technology

• Formulate and evaluate clinical guidelines

7. Compression of images

• Public health research methods
• Economic evaluation of care interventions; health technology assessment

 

Educational goals

This course is about the several types of information that are needed in the decision-making process, monitoring and adjustment of care processes at the meso-level (department, hospital, care provider) and the macro-level (specialisms, national).

 

Monitoring is about describing, standardising and comparing; adjustments are done with regard to scientific and management information; based on economic principles, organisational princliples and professional handling. Processes at meso-level and macro-level are discussed and their current developments are described and how they could be influenced.

 

At the end of the course the student has knowledge of and insight into the most important methods in the area of decision making, monitoring and adjustement of care processes at meso-level and macro-level.

 

Involved departments

• ADICT
• Clinical Epidemiology & Bio-Statistics
• Clinical Informatics
• GP Medicine
• Press and Education
• Social Medicine

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

This course was about policy and management. It is important to lecture this course, because medical informatics is involved in the policy of a healthcare institution. I learned a lot during this course. In particular I learned a lot about writing an advisory report and debating about the topics of the advisory reports; these academic skills are not practiced frequently.

 

However the first two weeks of this course are almost a copy of the eighth course of the study, this was not necessary and annoying. We expressed it to the coordinator and he said he would change the setup. The rest of the course was more interesting.

 

The feedback given on the advisory reports was useful; even so the lectures given by Meerstra about the Dutch language were useful and very interesting. Thanks to the feedback provided I improved my academic writing skills. I also improved my debating and feedback was useful to improve this skill.