​​Expected Student Competencies

Upon completion of the Master of Science in Health Informatics, graduates will possess skills and competencies in the following areas (from the CAHIIM Curriculum Map):

  • ​Healthcare organization, systems and workflow

  • Health information systems characteristics, strengths and limitations 

  • Health information systems assessment methods and tools

  • Quality assessment including total quality management, data quality, and identification of best practices for health information systems

  • Health IT standards

  • Use of healthcare terminologies, vocabularies and classification systems   

  • Health information exchanges (HIE)

  • Electronic health records and personal health records

  • Patient rights and HIPAA

  • Privacy and confidentiality of patient health information

  • Information security practices

  • Management of information systems including life cycle analysis, system design, planning methods and tools

  • Knowledge management systems

  • Workflow process re-engineering

  • Professional ethics and professional business etiquette

  • Strategic planning

  • Finance and budgeting and cost-benefit analysis for information systems

  • Assessment of commercial vendor products and software applications    

  • Policy development and documentation

  • History of health informatics development and health informatics literature 

  • Medical decision-making: principles, design, implementation

  • Development of healthcare terminologies, vocabularies and ontologies

  • Clinical data standards theory and development

  • Clinical data and clinical process modeling (such as UML-Unified Modeling Language, UP-Unified Process)

  • Artificial intelligence

  • Biomedical simulations

  • Computer science theory and methods

  • Programming language(s) (such as SQL, JAVA)

  • Software applications – design, development, use

  • Systems testing and evaluation

  • System integration tools

  • Networking principles, methods, design

  • Principles of data representation

  • Electronic data exchange

  • Health Information systems architecture, database design, data warehousing 

  • Technical security applications and issues

  • IT system documentation

  • Business continuity and disaster recovery

  • Biomedical Sciences (such as medical terminology, anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology)