Overview

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This course provides an introduction to health informatics, the discipline at the intersection of people, information, and technology in healthcare. Across four modules, it covers the transition from paper to electronic records and the distinctions among EMR, EHR, PHR, and CHR; how healthcare data is captured, organized, and stored, including database fundamentals, the components of the electronic health record, and the usability and workflow factors that determine whether systems succeed; the standards and terminologies that enable interoperability — HL7, FHIR, LOINC, SNOMED CT, ICD-10, and DICOM — along with health information exchange and information-blocking policy; and the application of informatics to clinical decision support and patient safety, telemedicine and telehealth, consumer and public health informatics, privacy and security, and artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Syllabus

Welcome to Health Informatics

Welcome to the beginning of your health informatics journey. This field sits at the intersection of healthcare, information, and technology. This first module hooks you into the story, starting where the field started: with paper. You'll see the real, sometimes dangerous problems paper-based healthcare created, then watch the field transform — from a 1961 experiment filmed at Johns Hopkins to today's EHR giants like Epic and Cerner, and tomorrow's AI-driven tools. You'll also learn what “health informatics” actually means, meet the people who do this work, and finish able to tell the EMR/EHR/PHR terms apart and place yourself on the field's map.

How Healthcare Data Is Captured and Organized

Every EHR, every lab result, every imaging study rests on a foundation of basic computing concepts. In this module you'll build that foundation, and then see how it shapes the electronic health record itself: what's in it, how data gets into it, and why a beautifully engineered system can still fail if people can't use it. We deliberately skip the procurement-focused parts of the for-credit course (RFPs, vendor scoring, contracts) and keep its one durable lesson — that implementations succeed or fail on people and workflow, not technology.

Making Systems Talk: Standards and Interoperability

Healthcare runs on data — but data is only useful if systems can share it. This module tackles one of the most technically complex and politically charged challenges in the field: getting healthcare systems to speak the same language. You'll learn to read a real clinical message the way an integration engineer does. We cover what standards are and why they matter, the problem of identifying patients, the message standards that move clinical data (HL7 v2 and the modern FHIR), the terminology systems that give clinical concepts shared meaning (LOINC, SNOMED CT, ICD-10), and how images move (DICOM and PACS). We close with health information exchange and the ONC Cures Act Final Rule.

Informatics in Action: Safety, Care, and the Future

This final module is where everything comes together. You've learned what the field is, how data is captured, and how systems talk. Now you'll see informatics applied to the hardest problems: keeping patients safe, extending care beyond the clinic walls, putting patients and populations at the center, protecting privacy, and harnessing AI responsibly. We open with a central tension — the same technology designed to make care safer can also make it more dangerous — then tour telemedicine and evidence-based medicine, consumer and public health informatics, privacy/security/ethics, and the AI-driven future.