These online notes come from the lecture notes for the course, "Introduction to Medical Informatics." The notes are quite detailed, totaling over 100 printed pages (over 200 kilobytes in ASCII). In recent years there has been a surge of interest at universities around the world in introductory courses to medical informatics, and this has prompted a flurry of syllabi passing over the internet as educators try to help each other to create new courses. This activity prompted me to put our course's detailed lecture notes on the Web. The notes are far from perfect, but when you are creating a new course, input like this can be very helpful.
These notes are in outline form because their primary role is to remind the lecturer of the topics to be discussed and to supply concrete numbers and dates in appropriate places. The lecturer fills in anecdotes, diagrams, and recent updates. Many sections of the notes comprise lists of reasons or lists of advantages and disadvantages. They are not meant to be enumerated by the lecturer, but elicited from the students, who manage to come up with new items each year.
Currently missing from the notes are complete references to the literature (each chapter has a related reading at the end, but this must be vastly expanded), diagrams, and perhaps an English rather than outline version. If there is sufficient interest, these notes may grow into a hypertext introduction to medical informatics, but this can only happen with outside contributions.
These lecture notes began in 1990, when Robert Sideli, MD, first directed the Columbia University course "Computer Applications in Clinical Medicine." It was based largely on the book edited by E.H. Shortliffe, L.E. Perreault, G. Wiederhold, and L.M. Fagan titled Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care (Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1990).
Initially, the course was taught by a series of invited lecturers, with Dr. Sideli organizing the lectures and teaching several of them. Over a three year period, Dr. Sideli took over responsibility for all of the lectures, resulting in a more consistent course. The course moved through a series of homes--the School of Library Service to the Department of Computer Science--and a series of cousre numbers--K8244, W6244x, and W4501.
In 1993, George Hripcsak, MD, took over the course. The course took on a new number and name: G4001 "Introduction to Medical Informatics," and it became jointly offered in the new Department of Medical Informatics, the Department of Computer Science, and the School of Public Health (Health Policy and Management division). Over a three year period, Dr. Hripcsak reorganized the course and rewrote the lectures to broaden the course from its "computer applications" origin to a more general medical informatics introduction.
In 1996, Robert A. Jenders, MD, MS, became instructor for the course. He continued the process of revising both these notes and the accompanying reading list. This was done in part to make the course adhere more closely than before to the principal subject areas of the new PhD program in Medical Informatics, inaugurated in 1996.
While the course has changed a great deal since 1990, we owe a great debt to the editors and authors of the course's original textbook, Medical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care.
Educators and other users are free to make copies of the notes and distribute them for teaching purposes without charge. In return, please report (jenders@columbia.edu) who used it, and when, where and how it was used (for example, your email address and name, university, course name, type of students, number of students). This information will help to decide whether to maintain and improve the notes on the Web.
Copyright 1993, 1995 by George Hripcsak.
The notes are far from perfect. Corrections are very welcome. Please send mail to Robert Jenders at jenders@columbia.edu. The more concrete the suggestion, the easier it will be to incorporate.
Contributions are also welcome (jenders@columbia.edu). We will try to incorporate new lectures and rewrites of existing lectures. The latter includes updating and expanding the information, adding references to the literature, adding hypertext links to Web resources, and possibly turing the current outline form into readable English. Anyone who contributes a lecture or a rewrite will be considered a coauthor of the notes.