Lecturer: Riccardo Bellazzi   Silvana Quaglini  

Course name: Medical Informatics
Course code: 502496
Degree course: Bioingegneria
Disciplinary field of science: INF-INF/06
L'insegnamento è caratterizzante per: Bioingegneria
University credits: ECTS 12
Course website: n.d.

Specific course objectives

The course aims to provide the basic elements of Medical Informatics as a discipline. Medical Informatics can be seen as the "logic" of healthcare, or as the rational study of the entire process of patient care. Students will then learn the basic elements of healthcare organization in Italy and abroad and the problems related to the representation of medical information. The course will develop along three lines: the study of databases in healthcare, the study of issues related to the exchange of data and information in health care information systems and finally on learning the lMATLAB, SQL and XML. At the end of the course the student will have acquired the basic skills necessary to understand what are the tasks and activities of information systems in health care.

Course programme

Elements of health care organization

• The organization of health care in Italy
• The reimbursement of hospital services
• The DRG system
• Indicators of efficiency and effectiveness

Representing information

• Coding Systems: ICD9, ICD9-CM, ICD10, ATC, LOINC
• Terminology: SNOMED
• meta-thesaurus: UMLS
• Standards: HL7

Information systems and computer networks in healthcare

• The structure and key elements of health information systems
• UML diagrams, use case, activity and sequence
• Computer Networks
• The ISO / OSI model
• Ethernet, TCP / IP
• Internet and the HTTP protocol
• Security and privacy: elements of legislation
• Digital signature and HTTPS

Matlab

• Matlab: a software environment for numerical computation and engineering
• Matlab as a programming language, toolboxes
• Vectors and matrices, cell arrays, structures
• Control structures
• Functions
• Reading and writing files
• Development of graphical user interfaces
• Writing and Reading XML documents in Matlab

XML

• Introduction to XML and Markup Languages ​​in
• Documents well formed
• Introduction to DTD
• Valid documents
• Using XML editor
• XML Parsers
• XML Schemas

Practical Activities with Matlab
Students will work in groups to program a Matlab application with a graphical interface for the management of hospital data. The available files are samples of real hospitals data.

The medical record

• the medical records department and ambulatory
• the purpose of the medical record
• sections of the medical record
• medical records as databases
• the identification of the patient

Relational databases

• The relational model
• The functional dependencies and the key relationship
• Dependency diagrams
• Redundancy and normal forms
• Entity-relationships diagrams
• Introduction to relational algebra

SQL

• Elements of Boolean logic
• The DDL and DML
• The indexes
• Selecting data from a table
• Selecting data from multiple tables: iUnion, Join and subquery commands
• The main functions on different domains (numeric, alphanumeric, date)

Practical activities on relational databases
Students will modify a database initially provided and then extract data using SQL in order to produce results with statistics and basic reports. They will use MS-Access.

Course entry requirements

Basic informatics and programming skills

Course structure and teaching

Lectures (hours/year in lecture theatre): 90
Practical class (hours/year in lecture theatre): 0
Practicals / Workshops (hours/year in lecture theatre): 0

Suggested reading materials

Slides and notes available at: http://elearning2.unipv.it/ingegneria/

D. Comer. Internet e Reti di calcolatori. Addison-Wesley.

Joe Fawcett, Danny Ayers, Liam R. E. Quin. Beginning XML, 5th Edition (ebook).

Dan Pilone, Neil Pitman. UML 2.0 in a Nutshell. O'Reilly.

Testing and exams

Written exam. Software projects. SQL queries exam. Oral exam.