Course description

Course lay-out

This course is closely related and intertwined with software engineering theory (course number 11) and software engineering project (course number 12). In this course has been setup according to the Problem Oriented Education (POE) model. In summary: students are devided into two groups and will discuss several cases presented to them and create educational goals. Each case is problem in the area of software engineering in the healthcare. Selfstudy is required to answer the educational goals and in the next meeting the results of the selfstudy is reported to the group. The coordinator will intervene when necessary.

 

Each group will meet every week for two hours, during this meeting the case is presented and discussed; which knowledge is already known and which parts of the case have to be researched, these parts form the educational goals. Each student will be the chair at a given time and another student will write everything down. These meetings will be supported by some lectures given throughout this course. During the intramural internship process and information analysis are crucial aspects to participate in the software engineering project.

 

Educational goals

The goal of this course is to gain experience in the clinical domain, clinical practice and clinical management. Furthermore the student will gain more experience in mapping information flows (current flows and desired flows) which support the clinical practice and the clinical management.

 

Involved departments

• Clinical Informatics
• Neurosurgery

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

During this internship I acquired insight into clinical management and clinical practice. It was very interesting to see what is going on at a specific department. The goal of the internship was to map the information flows and determine which problems exist at the department. Before you can map any information flow, you need to know which information flows are present at the department. When you have determined which information flows exist, you need to determine how they are related to each other. By interviewing and short conversations we acquired insight into the information flows that exists. We analyzed several systems and look at things that came to our attention. The people we interviewed reported many problems at the department of neuro surgery. The mapping of the different information flows was very difficult, but we succeeded and we learned a lot.

 

I liked it to question and interview people about their work and processes in which they were involved; especially persons who were end-users of a particular system. End-users are invaluable in the analysis of processes and systems, they have a lot of information about specific processes and or systems and the problems that are related to these processes and systems. It was nice to do our internship at the neuro surgery department. May be I will do a project in the future at this department. Our supervisor was very enthusiastic about the work we did, just like everyone we spoke about our project.