Course Offerings
Explore designing and implementing information technologies to improve healthcare delivery, healthcare management, and health outcomes. Offered on the letter-grade basis only.
Overview of public health and the information systems used to achieve public health goals. This course is divided into three parts: (1) overview of public health, (2) fundamentals of public health informatics, and (3) public health information systems.
Leveraging medical claims data to guide population health interventions, primarily through the use of machine learning models. The course will focus on the data processing pipeline, and no prerequisite knowledge of machine learning models is required
Explore principles and methodologies in health informatics research, including various approaches to data analysis, research design, and the application of informatics to health. Develop skills in reading, reviewing, and writing scientific publications, identifying research questions, initiating research, and communicating findings.
The course is designed for undergraduate students who are interested in understanding, analyzing, designing, evaluating, or developing technologies to serve the health needs of general consumers. It covers the concept of consumer health informatics, health behavior theories, health information seeking and information retrieval, various forms of consumer health systems, and the design and evaluation of such systems.
New Topic for Spring 2025. Description pending submission by instructor, Steve Hershman. Also offered as Informatics 320D.
The use of information and communication technologies varies across the lifespan. Different age groups differ not only in the platforms and content they engage with, but also in their goals, psychological characteristics, and digital literacies. Questions about technology's effects on different age groups are central to both scholarly research and policymaking (e.g., debates over banning smartphones in schools). This course surveys the broad landscape of research on the use of technology across the lifespan, bridging disciplinary perspectives and topics. In doing so, we will integrate theoretical perspectives on human development to understand how users of different ages experience different technologies. Through discussions and projects, students will analyze research findings, apply theories to real-world use cases, and develop technology design or policy proposals tailored to specific age groups.
This course starts by discussing broad landscape of epistemological and theoretical perspectives and styles of reasoning and by situating in it quantitative research. It introduces you to the foundational concepts in quantitative research methods, such as causality, conceptualization, operationalization, measurement and sampling. It presents experimental design, survey design, and basic descriptive and inferential (frequentist) statistics, as well as a brief introduction to Bayesian inference and statistics.