Calendar description

Weekly schedule -- lectures -- tutorials

Virtual Class Attendance

Course description:

The purpose of this course is to introduce two key technologies that play a critical role in the management of health care, computer networks and the World Wide Web, and how they are used to perform key functions in health care, health record management and access to medical knowledge. Specific objectives of the course are to give students an appreciation of some of the details of related computer technology, including web programming, databases, medical image management, and computer security.
The course will include 3 hours of lecture and 3 hours of tutorials per week, which will complement each other, in that lectures will focus on conceptual issues, while tutorials will focus on technology details. Students are expected to participate actively in the lectures and tutorials and contribute their own work experience to enrich the course content with case studies.

Evaluation

Assignments will be a mix of essay-type questions that will require some research, and simple programming (SQL, HTML, PHP) questions that will consist of building components of the project.

The exam will be closed-book and based on lecture and homework material. It will consist of essay-type and simple numerical questions questions testing your understanding of main concepts covered. The best way to study for them is to review the lectures and homework and the associated web resources. Try to focus on understanding the big picture, not on memorizing technical details that can be easily looked up.

Please familiarize yourself with the Faculty's Plagiarism Policy. Every suspected case of plagiarism will be referred to the Senate Discipline committee, and the standard penalty for a first offence is failure in the course.
There are no supplemental exams for this course.

Reference textbooks

Lawrence Snyder:
Fluency with Information Technology: Skills, Concepts & Capabilities, book info companion site
Addison Wesley, 2nd Ed., 2006, ISBN-13: 978-0-321-35782-5
(It covers most of the general databases, networks, programming concepts we discuss in this class at a similar level. It covers Javascript instead of PHP).

Douglas Comer:
The Internet Book
Pearson-Prentice Hall, 4th Ed., 2006, ISBN: 0-13-233553-0
(a warm and fuzzy introduction to the Internet)

The following textbooks are tutorial in nature, and they may be helpful in learning the basics of MySQL and PHP for the project. You may find that the tutorials and the on-line references already have more than enough information from your project, so these textbooks are optional.

Larry Ullman. MySQL. PeachPit Press. 2003.

Luke Welling, Laura Thompson: PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition, Sams Publishing, 2003 (e-book available on campus )

Additional Readings

• XML - technical
• The Semantic Web
• Tutorials on XML, HTML, etc.
• HTML tutorial
• MySQL tutorial - MySQL reference manuals
• PHP/MySQL tutorial
• TCP/IP
• HTTP/HTML
• Cryptography
• Security
• Dublin Core
• The use of Dublin Core metadata in a structured health resource guide on the Internet
• Health Level 7
• DICOM
• MySQL documentation site.
• Glossaries of Internet terms 1 2 Wikipedia
• Wikibooks online textbooks on many topics written in the Wiki model.
• Clinical medical information resources (for possible text mining)
  http://www.emedicine.com/
  Evidence-based expertise PEPID (on palms in emergency medicine) http://www.pepid.com/
  Evidence synthesis tool: http://www.infopoems.com/
  

Sample xsl programs

Dalhousie Health Informatics

Students with disabilities are encouraged to register as quickly as possible at the Student Accessibility Services if they want to receive academic accommodations. To do so please phone 494-2836, e-mail access <at-symbol> dal.ca , drop in at the Killam, G28 or visit our website at www.studentaccessibility.dal.ca  .

Thursday, 27-Sep-2007 12:47