LII:Health Informatics: Data and Interoperability Standards

Title: Health Informatics: Data and Interoperability Standards

Author for citation: Mark Braunstein, Georgia Tech

License for content: Unknown

Publication date: 2019

This is a Georgia Tech-created course that is released on the edX platform. The self-paced five-week course is designed to help learners to better understand "the key standards for representing and sharing healthcare data." The course is free to take, with a Verified Certificate of completion available for $99. The course requires on average 10–11 hours a week of effort. Additionally, this course is part of Georgia Tech's professional certificate program titled Health Informatics on FHIR, for those wanting to take all three courses for their professional cert'.

The edX course description:

"Once electronic health records and other clinical systems used in patient care are digital, the focus turns to how this health information can be represented and shared using standards. Developing standards that are both sufficiently comprehensive and also implementable in practice is one of the long-standing health informatics challenges in part because of the complexity of the human body and the resultant complexity of patient care. We discuss data and data sharing (interoperability) standards separately but they are inevitably intertwined since the information being shared using interoperability standards is often represented using data standards."

"What you'll learn:

Working familiarity with the major health care data standards
Awareness of the web-based tools for accessing the data standards
HL7 as the global health care interoperability standards organization
HL7 interoperability standards history
The HL7 interoperability standards that preceded FHIR
The FHIR interoperability standard
The SMART on FHIR EHR connected app platform
Familiarity with web-based tools for learning and utilizing FHIR and SMART on FHIR"

About the authors

The edX instructor is Mark Braunstein of Georgia Tech. "Dr. Braunstein is a professor of health informatics for the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches Introduction to Health Informatics, a popular graduate seminar, both on campus and as part of the OMSCS program. He is involved with HL7 and in various research projects at Georgia Tech, and works with and advises numerous community and industry groups."

General layout and contents of the course

The course is split into two primary lessons: the first about applicable data standards in general (including ICD, CPT, and LOINC, among others), while the second focuses on "pre-FHIR interoperability standards."