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Plan of Study

Year 1:

Summer

NURS6510
Healthcare Informatics

This course is designed to introduce the student to fundamental concepts and issues surrounding technology and information management in today’s rapidly changing health care environment. Emphasis will be placed on defining informatics and the models and theories used in its development. To prepare the student to take a leadership role in information system design and selection the class will study the process of information systems analysis, implementation and evaluation involving functional, organizational and human aspects.

Fall

NURS5730
Innovation in Health: Foundations of Design Thinking

Innovation, defined as a hypothesis-driven, testable, and disciplined strategy, is important to improve health & healthcare. Employing new ways of thinking, such as with design thinking, will help open up possibilities of ways to improve health & the process of healthcare. Incorporating current & emerging social & digital technologies such as mobile apps, wearables, remote sensing, and 3D printing, affords new opportunities for innovation. This course provides foundational content & a disciplined approach to innovation as it applies to health & healthcare. A flipped classroom approach with the in-class component focusing on group learning through design thinking activities. The course is open to undergraduate nursing students as a case study & upper-level undergraduates and graduate students from across the Penn campus. The course provides a theoretical foundation in design thinking & may provide an overview of innovation technology & digital strategies as well as social & process change strategies. To enhance the didactic component, students will actively participate in a design case study. Students will be matched by interest and skill level with teams & will work with community-based organizations, healthcare providers and/or innovation partners. Student teams will meet their partners to identify & refine a health or healthcare problem to tackle. Students will work throughout the semester to create an innovative solution that will be pitched to their community-based organization, healthcare provider, and/or innovation partner at the end of the semester.

Taught by: Leary

Course usually offered in fall term

Also Offered As: NURS 357

Prerequisites: Completed freshman & sophomore level courses or graduate student status.

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit

Elective – can be taken in fall or spring term (see list of approved electives https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/health-informatics-minor/plan-of-study/)

Spring

BMIN 502
Databases in Biomedical Research

This course is intended to provide in-depth, practical exposure to the design, implementation, and use of databases in biomedical research, and to provide students with the skills needed to design and conduct a research project using primary and secondary data. Tiopics to be covered include: database architectures, data normalization, database implementation, client-server databases, concurrency, validation, Structured-Query Language (SQL) programming, reporting, maintenance, and security. All examples will luse problems or data from biomedical domains. MySQL will be used as the database platform for the course, although the principles apply generally to biomedical research and other relational databases.

Taught by: Holmes

Course usually offered in spring term

Also Offered As: EPID 635

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit