Course description

Course Contents

Organisation structure and design

• Dimensions of organisations
• Strategy, organisation design and effectiveness
• Organisation structure (functional, divisional, etcetera)
• Environmental (un)certainty and stakeholders
• Coordinating mechanisms, (de)centralisation, specialisation

Hospitals

• Hospitals and other healthcare organisations
• Healthcare systems and healthcare reforms
• Organisational design and culture
• Role and position of healthcare professionals

Organisational dynamics

• Service organizations, information technology and control, organisation life cycle
• Organizational culture, innovation and change, decision-making processes
• Management, conflict, power and politics, steering and self-organisation

IT organisation

• IT organisation, (IT-)project and change management
• National initiatives and standardisation of IT
• Social-technical and cultural aspects of implementing IT

 

Course lay-out

The key topics will be presented in lectures, explored during exercises and discussions (seminar) and integrated in cases and/or examples in healthcare. Guest speakers are invited to tell about their experiences with organisational settings of healthcare (cases). The first three weeks of the course on Monday a task will be given and explained and on Friday this task has to be delivered and/or presented (workgroup). When working in a group is required to accomplish this task, Monday morning and Friday afternoon are advised to work together as a group. The weekly tasks vary from short papers about organisation structures to analysing an article and doing desk research on the internet on organisational theory.

 

Educational goals

Application of medical informatics in a clinical setting or in research requires understanding of organisational settings of healthcare. In this course students will get acquainted with organisational theory in general. By the end of this course students should have a good understanding of the organisational aspects and contextual dimensions of hospitals and have knowledge of how information technology can be organised within an organisation. Furthermore they should be aware of the importance of organisational and socio-cultural considerations while implementing IT.

 

During this course students will work individually and in groups to practice their analytic, discussion and presentation skills.

 

Involved departments

• Clinical Informatics

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

It was the first time for the coordinator to setup a course; this was noticeable the first week. The first two assignments were far to easy and not at a Master level; we provided the coordinator some feedback to change a couple of things in the course. He listened to us and the third assignment was very good with respect to difficulty and workload. For the third assignment we had to write a project plan for the AMC, we had the role as a project manager and you had to replace, remove and add some information systems to the hospital. It was very useful and interesting to think about how to implement a project plan. We had to write it down how we should do it and think about the milestones, purpose of the project, time frames, deliverables, stakeholders, etcetera. I liked this assignment, although I found it difficult to determine were to start. I discussed a lot with a fellow student about the assignment and I am delighted with the result. Next year there will be one assignment in this course, creating and writing a project plan. I learned a lot thanks to this assignment, my writing skills have been improved.