leaders speak
“Need for Training Medical Professionals� Dr Supten Sarabhadhikari, Founder of Supten Institute and an emissary of Health Informatics Standards, talks about creating a vibrant health network through e-learning. www.hl7india.org
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ealth informatics, which is also known by terminologies like healthcare informatics medical informatics, nursing informatics, clinical informatics or biomedical informatics, is a discipline that stands at the intersection of information science, computer science, and cutting edge healthcare. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required for optimising the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health in-
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january / 2012 www.ehealthonline.org
formatics tools include not only computers, but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. It is applied to the areas of nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy, and bio-medical research. Supten Institute offer courses intended to introduce the basics of healthcare informatics. At the end of completion of this course, the students are skilled in various learning techniques. The course teaches basic health informatics including electronic health / medical records (EHR/EMR), tele-health (ehealth and telemedicine), medical imaging, evidence-based medicine (EBM), and healthcare interoperability standards. The students are made aware of the role of hardware, software and networks that are used in healthcare. They are able to acquire skills in querying medical databases (including literature) relevant to clinical management and medical research. The students need to learn and understand basic skills required to develop databases relevant to healthcare and use of hospital information system. Supten Institute intends to become a centre of excellence for empowering professionals to effectively use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) applied to healthcare practice, education and research. The institute is committed to capacity building, for informed healthcare delivery in the 21st century, through the Internet, social networking sites and faceto-face classes i.e., Blended Learning. It shares the values of its founder whose commitment is to offer high quality education across time and space barriers to enable all human beings in asking for and delivering informed healthcare through informatics tools. The institute will offer courses through the programmes and examinations offered periodically at external locations. The programmes are in hybrid model, with one day of four courses being offered as a pre-conference or post-conference, the remaining six to eight courses are offered online. The certification exams are also conducted online.