Task: What do I expect to learn from Health Informatics 201 #MSHI

When I heard about the UP College of Medicine planning to create a graduate program in MS Informatics, I wanted to be one of the first to enroll. Alas, I kept asking for at least 2 years… or was it 2 semesters… there was no such program YET. Then I got more and more ingrained in the practice of pediatric ophthalmology, and forgot all about it until I hit the ripe age of 50!

Then you sit back and think, what I should have done that I haven’t done. And you realize at this ripe age, we have the opportunity to become policy changers, forward movers, and critical thinkers. The sad part is, we started with the electronic medical records (EMR) in 1998, and we crafted the contents of the EMR for the Sentro Oftalmologico Jose Rizal in the Philippine General Hospital, all 12 subspecialties. Yet, we didn’t persist, and where is our data now?

This time I wanted to do it right. Start with the EMR, fix the EMR for the Sentro Oftalmologico Jose Rizal and try and make sense of all the data we are generating from our patients at the Philippine General Hospital. Whatever we learn, we have the opportunity to use these data to improve patient care not only for our patients, for the nation. Our data can help give basis for national policies and improve standards of care.

All other things I will learn will be bonuses. For starters, it is my first time to create a site, where I can even blog! Next step was to figure out how to share it through facebook and twitter. (A little bit intimidating as more than just friends can read what I share). But I resolved to maximize whatever social media like facebook and twitter can bring to educate my patients, friends and family.   I will bleed this opportunity till it dries! The best is it also permits me to interact with my 16-year old son. He was the one who told me Wix, Weebly, or Word Press will start you off on the blog your teacher required.   He even said it was simpler to use Word Press, but Weebly is more “maarte.” If you search #MSHI, that is not a group, that just means all of the topics on MSHI will show up. It was he who found my teachers twitter account and hit “follow’ for me. As for the last instructions: to post a link of this blog on the FB PMIS, he said…”why don’t you just confess to your teacher that you do not know much on how to go about your homework on FB.” So I sent an SOS, asked “cher” what’s FB PMIS, it is the facebook page of Philippine Medical Informatics Society! That’s why he didn’t know.

I think HI 201 will be the gateway of the direction of information I will learn and can learn. It will give me an overview of exactly where informatics play a role in the health care system and delivery. In the process, I think I will learn to appreciate data more, make sense of data more, program electronic medical records to be useful, create a website, a blog site, and education site, among others. In the end, it will be fun to learn something new again.