Education

Education

Connecting Health Care and Information Technology

Should a patient's temperature be recorded on a paper or electronic chart? This decision likely was made long before the patient's physician needed the vital signs, but providers at the bedside have to know where to look for the information. At some point, health-care providers and administrators must set up systems to handle the influx of information spurred on by advancing technology. That’s where the fledgling field of health informatics comes into the picture.

"Health informaticians work at the boundaries between information technology and health-care delivery," said Dr. David Masuda, senior lecturer in medical education and biomedical informatics.


	Bioinformatics graduate Army Maj. Nicole Kerkenbush, a nurse at Madigan Army Medical Center, talks with another soldier.

UW graduate students interested in biomedical and health informatics have the option of a earning a graduate certificate or a degree administered through the Biomedical and Health Informatics Program in the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics of the School of Medicine. Students from several partner programs have enrolled in the program, including students in the Schools of Nursing, Public Health, Health Administration and the Information School.

"We’re training practitioners in health fields to assist in the design and deployment of the right technology solutions to today’s pressing healthcare problems,” said Masuda.

There are fewer than 25 similar programs listed in the American Medical Informatics Association Database, and the UW program is the first in the region.

In one year, the number of students interested in applying has gone from a handful to more than 60 vying for approximately 12 positions per year.

"This is a growing field because computing and communications technologies have the potential to aid in our efforts to increase access, control costs, and improve quality of care," explained Masuda. "We’ve seen successes but we’ve also seen failures, in part due to our often blind belief in information technology as a panacea. Our goal is to train students to be both realistic about the limits of technology and at the same time to be excited by the possibilities.”

The health informatics-training program includes a coordinated series of four to five core courses and an applied capstone project, completed in the second year of the program. The course work is integrated with the student’s studies in their professional field, whether it is nursing, computer sciences, pharmacy or another discipline.

Army Maj. Nicole Kerkenbush, a registered nurse, was one of the first graduates of the certificate program, which she received in conjunction with her dual master's degrees in nursing and health administration. Her thesis project was a comparison of written and electronic daily diaries kept by diabetic patients at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash.

"When I started graduate school, I knew that I wanted to do something at the intersection of technology and health care," said Kerkenbush. "I'd worked with another UW nursing graduate student coordinating and organizing a diabetic management program at Madigan. I'd watched patients bring in written diaries that had coffee spilled on them or weren't filled in completely, or they'd just forget them. Providers were a little frustrated because they weren't able to monitor patients accurately without a daily record."

For Kerkenbush's project, five personal digital assistants (PDAs) were donated to UW by Palm, Inc., and software was provided by Animus Corp. PDAs have been used successfully to monitor patient diaries in drug trials, Kerkenbush said. Her idea was to use the PDAs as diabetic diaries, primarily to record blood glucose levels, diet intake, and activity level.

"Lower levels of hemoglobin A1-C in the blood means a better quality of life for diabetics," said Kerkenbush. "A common misconception is that only older people get diabetes. In actuality, many people are diagnosed with diabetes in their 40s and 50s. The hope is that PDAs will prove to be an easy way for these patients to record their diabetic information. Health-care providers could then sync up each patient's PDA, download information and monitor all of their diabetic patients in a blink of the eye."

Kerkenbush, who is the deputy chief of informatics at Madigan, suggested that further investigation could determine which patients are best suited to use PDAs as diabetic diaries.

In June 2003 the first five students, including Kerkenbush, received the health informatics certificate. The program is open to students enrolled in health sciences or information science graduate programs at the UW. Other biomedical and health informatics training options include a summer undergraduate research internship, master’s, and doctoral degree programs, as well as a post-doctoral fellowship program.

Details on these programs are on the UW Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics Web site.