Overview

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Explores issues of data representation in healthcare systems, including patient and provider identification, audit trails, authentication, and reconciliation. Discusses the underlying design of repositories for electronic health records (EHRs) and computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems. Includes an overview of privacy issues, legislation, regulations, and accreditation standards unique to healthcare.

Syllabus

Healthcare Data and the Ecosystem That Generates It

Welcome to Data Management in Healthcare! Before we can understand healthcare information systems, we need to understand the environment they operate in — and the data those systems are built to manage. Healthcare generates enormous amounts of data: clinical, financial, regulatory, and operational. But healthcare data isn't like data in other industries. Errors don't just cause inconvenience — they can harm or kill patients. Fragmentation isn't just inefficient — it's a structural feature of how the U.S. system is organized. And governance isn't optional — it's a regulatory and safety imperative. In this module, you'll explore what makes healthcare data unique, how data flows across the ecosystem, and what it takes to manage that data well.

Information Systems Inside the Provider Organization

Now that you understand the data itself, let's go inside the provider organization. Hospitals and clinics operate dozens of interconnected information systems — from clinical documentation to laboratory results to medication dispensing to radiology imaging to billing. How do these systems work? How do they connect? And when they don't connect well, what happens? In this module, you'll trace data from patient registration through discharge, learn to distinguish between the types of records and systems involved, and understand the strategic decisions organizations make when building their information architecture.

Making Systems Talk — Integration and Standards

You've learned what data healthcare systems manage and what those systems look like individually. Now comes the hardest part: making them talk to each other. In this module, you'll go inside the "plumbing" — the integration infrastructure that allows a hospital's 50–100 systems to communicate. You'll learn the architectural patterns that determine how systems connect, the messaging standards that power clinical workflows, the imaging standard that enables radiology, the modern API-based standard that's reshaping the field, and the terminologies that ensure systems actually understand the data they're exchanging.

Data Exchange Beyond the Provider — Payers, Regulations, and Patient Access

Modules 1–3 focused on data within the provider world. But healthcare data flows far beyond the hospital or clinic — to insurance companies, regulators, employers, pharmacies, and directly to patients and their apps. In this final module, you'll follow the data as it crosses organizational boundaries: from provider to payer through standardized administrative transactions, through clearinghouses that facilitate that exchange, and directly to patients through modern APIs. You'll also examine the regulatory landscape that governs this exchange — including the landmark Information Blocking provisions that prohibit practices restricting patient access to their own data.