Consumer Health Informatics.

Catalog description

Consumer health informatics (CHI) is a rapidly expanding area of informatics practice, with career opportunities emerging in the public, non-profit, and private sectors. Broadly, the field aims to give individual health care consumers, as well as their families and communities, the information and tools that they need to help them become more involved in their health and health care. In this course, students will become familiar with a range of CHI applications, including the needs/problems that the applications address, their theoretical bases and designs, and relevant evaluation results. The course will cover an overview of health behavior theories that are relevant to health behavior change and health information behavior and explore how they might be applied to promote changes in health behavior and/or explain health consumers’ behaviors. The course will also introduce key issues such and health literacy, patient-centered communication, patient empowerment, patient-generated data, participation, and privacy with a special focus on the application of CHI in areas of public health, including surveillance, prevention, preparedness, and health promotion. At the end of the course, students will have an ability to evaluate existing applications, and to generate theory-informed design and implementation strategies for CHI applications for potential users with a particular focus on groups that experience health care and information access disparities. Prerequisites: one course with statistics emphasis ( CJ 3332 , CR 3332 , MT 2303 , PO 2311 , PS 3381 , or SC 3381 ) or one research methods course ( SC 3306 , SC 4383 , or equivalent).