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Plan of Study

Year 1:

Summer

NURS6510
Healthcare Informatics

Healthcare systems and consumers today are becoming increasingly reliant on information technology. The objective of this course is to provide a foundation for knowledge about health information technology and to expose students, clinicians, and administrators to the breadth of tools and systems currently used in practice. We will explore topics such as mobile health applications/telehealth and their implications for clinical practice and impact on patient outcomes; electronic health records, data analytics, and visualization tools and how these can effectively be used to support decision making and patient care.

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 5020
Database and Data Integration 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. Topics 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 use 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. NOTE: Non-majors need permission from the department

Spring

1 Course Unit