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.
Healthcare is one of the most complex and high-stakes environments for technology design—where time is limited, decisions matter, and poorly designed tools can cause real harm. In this hands-on, interdisciplinary course, you will collaborate with Dell Medical School students and faculty to tackle real healthcare challenges using human-centered design and rapid prototyping. Guided by the Stanford d.school design thinking framework, you will move from empathizing and defining unmet needs to ideating, prototyping, and testing practical solutions that fit within real healthcare needs. Using Lovable vibe coding platform, you will focus on developing a meaningful core feature that addresses a specific problem. Working in teams, you will create product requirements documents (PRDs), design documentation, and functional web-based prototypes using vibe coding, conduct pilot testing, and refine your solution. Projects culminate in presentations at UT-level conferences and portfolio-ready materials to strengthen your resume, with exceptional teams having the opportunity to pursue IRB approval and submit their work to HCI, medical education, or healthcare conferences.
This class explores how to make arguments about and through design. The first half focuses on values, criticism, ethics, and analysis of technology, the latter portion aims to help a soon-to-graduate technologist envision positive social impact in a mission-driven enterprise. Students will practice synthesizing ethical tech considerations – as they will have to do for the rest of their careers – and combining this with an organizational mindset. Through exercises, role-playing, discussions, guest lectures from activist technologists, and wide-ranging readings, students will practice connecting broader implications of their designs with technical choices. Design for Social Impact seeks to arm students with diverse ways of reflecting on their authorial relationship to technology, drawing from art and design to political science and anthropology. Course participants will be encouraged to focus on areas of personal interest, enumerating the social, political, and economic parameters of particular technical systems: parameters that are as important as power consumption, usability, or efficiency.
Civic engagement involves joining with others to identify and address issues facing a community. Examples include volunteering to clean up a park, participating in a town hall meeting, and voting. Conversations about civic issues emerge in many public and private spaces, including public libraries, coffeeshops, and through group messaging platforms, like WhatsApp. This course will investigate how computing systems have been used to help people surface issues in various ways---from community sensing systems to crowdsourcing budget issues---as well as address issues through online discussion, mutual-aid, and coordinating volunteer networks. Technology can serve as a force multiplier for civic engagement; however, there are important considerations related to their design, deployment, and sustaining them over time. Civic technology is embedded within a policy, political, and technical environment that can be tricky to navigate. Many people also lack access to the time and training to fully engage with a technology; failure to recognize these barriers related to the “digital divide” can result in systematically preventing some groups of people from participating in civic activities. Additionally, there may be unanticipated risks associated with the way that a civic technology collects, manages, and shares personal as well as group level information. These ethical issues deserve special consideration in a civic engagement and socio-technical context.
This class explores how to make arguments about and through design. The first half focuses on values, criticism, ethics, and analysis of technology, the latter portion aims to help a soon-to-graduate technologist envision positive social impact in a mission-driven enterprise. Students will practice synthesizing ethical tech considerations – as they will have to do for the rest of their careers – and combining this with an organizational mindset. Through exercises, role-playing, discussions, guest lectures from activist technologists, and wide-ranging readings, students will practice connecting broader implications of their designs with technical choices. Design for Social Impact seeks to arm students with diverse ways of reflecting on their authorial relationship to technology, drawing from art and design to political science and anthropology. Course participants will be encouraged to focus on areas of personal interest, enumerating the social, political, and economic parameters of particular technical systems: parameters that are as important as power consumption, usability, or efficiency.