Courses

Compulsory Courses:

• Introduction to Health Informatics and Telehealth – eHealth – 03 credits
  Syllabus: Focus on eHealth strategies for Brazil as a public policy impacting health, particularly in care quality and patient safety. History and current situation of health information systems, with an emphasis on eSUS. Overview of the telehealth field, from clinical applications to planning, evaluation, and sustainability design. Key issues for developing and maintaining a successful eHealth and Telehealth program with focus on strategic planning, clinical applications, project management, risk management, legal issues, reimbursement, hiring, human resources, and program sustainability.

• Health Information Systems and Technology – 03 credits
  Syllabus: Emerging trends in various information systems, technologies, and applications used in health contexts. Their characteristics, strengths, challenges, objectives, and impacts on patients, populations, and healthcare professionals. Factors influencing the adoption and use of various clinical and health information systems and technologies. Key health information technologies and systems in public health, such as integrated electronic health records, health information sharing, personal health records, decision support systems, and mobile health technologies.

• Health Data: Vocabularies, Terminologies, and Standards – 03 credits
  Syllabus: Introduction to various electronic health information standards, including vocabulary standards, clinical terminologies, and messaging standards. Application of knowledge discovery and extraction techniques, such as natural language processing and text mining for health and clinical scenarios. Introduction to health and data communication standards, storage, and representation, emphasizing new paradigms. Exploration of challenges in representing health data using standardized vocabulary in health information systems. Topics include data standards and semantics, policy, and theory and practice of standardization.

• Ethical and Legal Aspects in eHealth and Health Information Management – 02 credits
  Syllabus: Legal, ethical, and management challenges affecting eHealth/ICT. Solutions and recommendations for best practices and possible paths forward, including issues related to electronic health records, telehealth, the Internet and medications, health information systems, professional responsibility, and user perception.

• Research Methodology and Decision-Making in Healthcare – 03 credits
  Syllabus: Introductory statistical approaches and their application to health and care data. Quantitative research methods, research evaluation, and design. Technological innovation, patents, and intellectual property. Best practices in strategic management of large health data. Principles and concepts of data warehousing. Data warehouse design for a health or care scenario. Online analytical processing and data mining. Introduction to data architecture, integration, and management companies.

• Security and Usability in Health Information Systems – 03 credits
  Syllabus: Technical introduction to information and network security theory and practice. Basic knowledge of cryptography and its applications in modern network protocols. Firewall architectures and virtual private networks, widely used network security protocols such as SSL, TLS, SSH, Kerberos, IPSec, IKE, and LDAP. Countermeasures for Distributed Denial of Service attacks, routing protocol security, and Domain Name System security. Email spam security countermeasures, wireless security, multicast security, and negotiation trust. Design of usable technology in user-centered information technology (IT), particularly in health IT applications and ISO 9241-210 usability standards.

• Knowledge Management and Databases – 03 credits
  Syllabus: Introduction to database management systems theory and application. Relational models, object-related modeling (UML – Unified Modeling Language). Basic and intermediate query formulation using Structured Query Language, relational database design – entity modeling, database normalization, and optimization. Emerging themes relevant to health professionals, including personal health information, privacy and security considerations, XML as a data model, and clinical data mining.

• Dissertation Seminar (Advisors) – 06 credits

Elective Courses:

• Algorithms and Programming – Formal Languages and Methods – 02 credits
  Syllabus: Introduction to algorithms; Basic types, variables, and constants; Arithmetic, logical, and relational operators; Assignment commands, data input and output; Control structures: sequential, conditional, and repetition; Composite variables; Modularization of algorithms; Search and sorting algorithms.

• Biomedical Signal and Image Processing – 02 credits
  Syllabus: Image perception; Medical image formation: physical principles and models. Analog and digital images; Methods for medical image acquisition, processing, and display. Image compression techniques. DICOM standard; PACS system; Image transmission. Image security and quality aspects; Biological signal characteristics; Biological signal acquisition systems; Data compression techniques and their application to electrocardiography signals. Artifact removal techniques. Application in event detection in biological signals.

• Systems Analysis and UML – 02 credits
  Syllabus: Introduction to object-oriented design with UML and RUP. Business modeling: business use case diagrams, activity diagrams, and state machine diagrams. High-level requirements: system use case diagrams. Detailed requirements: expanded use cases. Conceptual modeling and analysis patterns. Interface modeling with IFML.

• Virtual Reality, Simulation, and Robotics – 02 credits
  Syllabus: Fundamental concepts of virtual reality (VR), applications of VR in health, development, and application of virtual and augmented reality; haptic devices. Introduction to robotics and definitions; morphology, components, and classification of robots, applications of robotics in health.

• Special Topics in Health Informatics (as demand requires) – 02 credits
  Syllabus: In-depth studies on different topics in health informatics, not covered in mandatory or elective subjects, offered as current, controversial, and/or innovative topics of interest for research, healthcare, and health education with an emphasis on teleconsultation and formative second opinions, telecare, tele-research, tele-education, patient safety, evaluation tools in Health Informatics, emerging technologies in the web, and mobile applications.

Total Credits in the Course: 28 credits, with 20 compulsory credits and at least 02 elective credits. The subjects will be quarterly, so the elective subjects should be taken according to the offerings for that quarter. The total of 28 credits will also include the 06 credits that comprise the dissertation seminar.