Informatics and Improvement Work in Health Care Organisations, 7.5 credits

Passed all courses from semester 1 and at least 10 credits from semester 2 at the Master's programme in health informatics.

On completion of the course, the student should be able to  apply evidence-based knowledge to lead and manage improvement projects in healthcare supported by health informatics.

On completion of the course, the student should be able to:

Management and leadership

• Explain how management, leadership, organisation and structure influence the organisation's ability to reach its defined goals and visions.
• Initiate, lead and support improvement work within healthcare.
• Argue for and against different improvement strategies.

Improvement work

• Apply different improvement tools and methods to identify problems, test ideas at a small scale, evaluate results and present how these can improve healthcare.
• Apply theories of change management in improvement of health care services.
• Apply health informatics methods to support improvement work in health care.

The course should introduce the students to the subjects management, leadership and improvement work. The content of the course builds on practice experiences and skills as well as reflections on how theories within leadership, learning, improvement work and health informatics can be applied to improve healthcare. During the course, the student will continuously test and apply newly acquired knowledge. At the end of the course, each student will thereby have gained experience and have learned concrete tools to be able to improve healthcare.

The course facilitation aims to integrate informatics, management and leadership. The working methods of the course aim to train interaction, critical reflection and analysis based on a scientific approach. In this course, different student-centered working methods are used to stimulate an active knowledge acquisition and to optimise the possibility to achieve the expected learning outcomes of the course. These activities can include storytelling, seminars, pauses for reflection, cases, case methodology, PBL with support lectures, case-in-point, "peer-to-peer" feedback and miniprojects. There will be both physical and virtual (web-based) meetings.

The course will be examined through individual assignments (A-F), a group assignment (pass/fail) and an oral presentation (pass/fail)s. In order to pass the course the student needs to pass all the exams.

In accordance with evidence based pedagogy, formative examination will be used during the course so that both teachers and the student will be able to follow the student's development towards attaining the outcomes while ensuring that support is offered when needed.

Compulsary participation
The course introduction, the final examination and certain exercises/seminars indicated in the course schedule require active participation. The course director assesses if, and in that case how, absence can be compensated. Before the student has participated in all compulsory parts or compensated absence in accordance with the course director's instructions, the student's results for the course will not be registered in LADOK.

Limitation of number of occasions to write the exam
The student has the right to write the exam six times. If the student has not passed the exam after four participations he/she is encouraged to visit the study advisor.

The number of times that the student has participated in one and the same examination is regarded as an examination session. Submission of a blank examination is regarded as an examination. An examination for which the student registered but not participated in will not be counted as an examination.
Transitional provisions
After each course occasion there will be at least six occasions for the examination within a 2-year period from the end of the course.

The course has been cancelled.

Course evaluation will be carried out in accordance with the guidelines established by the Board of Higher Education.

The course is given in English.