INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT

Penick, T. 2007. INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT: An Interdisciplinary Online Course in Health Care Informatics. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 2007; 71 (3) Article 43.
This is an article about an online course of health care informatics design by the University of North Carolina. They strive to develop an online interdisciplinary course in health care informatics. The provision of this course was to incorporate and provide students the require tools for them to incorporate the technology to find effective evidence based health care information.  This was provided as an online interdisciplinary online course elective. The method of teaching was through interactive and multimedia lectures using Internet communication software. It was concluded that this teaching method was effecting in teaching students about health informatics.  The students when completed the online course in health informatics the students demonstrated their competencies in identifying and applying informatics in health care settings.

If you would like to read about this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913289/

Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center Regional Medical Group Virtualizes Electronic Health Records with Windows Embedded

Hillcrest Family Health System from Texas, consists of: Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, a fully-accredited acute care facility, and Hillcrest Family Health Center a series of specialty medicine clinics. The situation this clinics were confronting were that the electronic health record they use constantly needed to be fixed, which resulted in two things very important loss of time and money. Since once a month they had to close all the clinics for a weekend to install and arrange their software’s.  The electronic health records are a collection of the health information of patients.

They consider Microsoft Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based server virtualization technology. This technology provided the tools the clinics needed in a cost effective manner through Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Hillcrest administration concluded that the use of Microsoft Virtualization allows the management of the clinics more simple and cost effective. This system allows the administration to integrate   160,000 patient records electronically and a hospital system a legacy 16-bit application. In addition they also included the Microsoft Office suite, Java, Adobe Flash, and a Virtual Machine.”

In conclusion the Microsoft Virtualization provided Hillcrest administration which includes: personalized desktop, built in connectivity and is ecofriendly. In addition the utilization allows easier HIPPA audits, reduced costs, and new service options for patients. The company invested $600,000 the EHR system but received the economical benefits in three years with a 35% reduction in cost in new technologies.

I think it is a nice thing to have systems such as the Microsoft that help the different clinics with the incorporation of technologies that will improve their services in a cost effective manner.

Integrating Informatics to Pharmacy Curricula

This is an article about the implementation of informatics awareness to pharmacy. Since informatics has increase in the last years many organizations has committed to increase the awareness of use in informatics. Pharmacy is not left behind in the use of informatics, since many universities has integrated courses of informatics to their curriculum in a way to educate students the importance of technology and the different ways to use it in our profession.
Domain one: student exit competencies in informatics – expertise in informatics is one of the require competencies for pharmacy graduates.
Domain two: informatics as an aid to student learning -  is for students to learn to appreciate the importance of technology.

Domain three: support for individual faculty efforts in promoting informatics -  all the faculty and administration need to know how to handle and work with technology in order to provide the knowledge to students.

Domain four: academic leadership within healthcare pharmacy informatics - within the pharmacy informatics area, we are not the experts in software design

Domain five: graduate programs in pharmacy informatics given the necessity for pharmacy academic -  provide students with  research, training, development, and implementation of pharmacy

informatics by the profession and disciplines within pharmacy

This quote was from the article Implementing Pharmacy Informatics in College Curricula: The AACP Technology in Pharmacy Education and Learning Special Interest Group.


Reference: Vanderbush, R, 2007. Implementing Pharmacy Informatics in College Curricula: The AACP Technology in Pharmacy Education and Learning Special Interest Group. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 2007; 71 (6) Article 117

If you want to read the article complete the article can be find at:  

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article