Health Informatics Master of Science

Practical technologies that reveal health care solutions

Our 36-credit-hour program equips students to examine how patients use their health care information, and to the build the tools that make it easier to manage unstructured data and extract useful information. By learning how to appropriately utilize natural language processing and other tools, our graduates can improve clinical decision support, electronic health records management, and patient privacy.

You’ll complete your health informatics master’s degree with either a thesis or a project, which provides a practical solution to a health information problem.

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Learning outcomes

Upon completion of the Master of Health Informatics, students attain the following competencies expected of practitioners in the discipline:

Fundamental professional and interdisciplinary skills:

• Analyze problems: Analyze, understand, abstract, and model a specific biomedical problem in terms of their data, information, and knowledge components.
• Produce solutions: Use the analysis to identify and understand the space of possible solutions and generate designs that capture essential aspects of solutions and their components.
• Implement, evaluate, and refine: Carry out the solution (including obtaining necessary resources and managing projects), evaluate it, and iteratively improve it.
• Innovate: Create new theories, typologies, frameworks, representations, methods, and processes to address biomedical informatics problems.
• Work collaboratively: Team effectively with partners within and across disciplines.

Health and health care systems skills:

• Understand the fundamentals of the field in the context of the effective use of biomedical data, information, and knowledge.
• For substantive problems related to scientific inquiry, problem solving, and decision making, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create solutions based on biomedical informatics approaches.
• Apply, analyze, evaluate, and relate biomedical information, concepts, and models spanning molecules to individuals to populations.
• Analyze and evaluate complex biomedical informatics problems in terms of data, information, and knowledge.

Technological skills:

• Apply, analyze, and create data structures, algorithms, programming, mathematics, statistics.
• Apply, analyze, and create technological approaches in the context of biomedical problems.
• Apply and evaluate methods of inquiry and criteria for selecting and using algorithms, techniques, and methods to solve substantive health informatics problems.

Human and social context:

Health Informatics recognizes that people are the end users of biomedical information, draws on the social and behavioral sciences to inform the design, development, and evaluation of technical solutions, policies, and economic, ethical, social, educational, and organizational systems.

The above learning outcomes are guided by this article:

Kulikowski, C. A., Shortliffe, E. H., Currie, L. M., Elkin, P. L., Hunter, L. E., Johnson, T. R., … & Smith, J. W. (2012). AMIA Board white paper: definition of biomedical informatics and specification of core competencies for graduate education in the discipline. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 19(6), 931-938.