Tuesday, November 5, 2013

What I'm getting out of being an Informatics student (so far)


  • A ton of homework.
  • An appreciation for what my daughter is going through in school.
  • Another 1000 words of writing to do each day.
  • A better understanding of what those involved in the healthcare system are thinking when they are doing their jobs.

Priceless.

I think what I love the most is hearing material that I might elsewhere be teaching, or which I've learned through the school of hard knocks being taught in a way that helps me relate to clinicians.  Now I can point to so-and-so's paper which classifies quality measures in three ways, instead of just knowing what the ways are.  Going back to some recent reading on rhetoric, this helps me to establish ethos with my audience.  I enjoy too seeing how others learn the material, and make use of it, and integrate it.  And I am beginning to see ways in my own work that I can change what I'm doing subtly to make what I'm trying to communicate easier to understand, as I struggle with understanding unfamiliar material yet again.

Learning about the practice of medicine, and studying pathophysiology to some degree also gives me a much greater appreciation of what physicians are trying to do, and how information systems that they are using can do the job better.  I'm beginning, just beginning mind you, to get a picture in my mind of what an EHR might look like that is radically different from current models.  It's a start.

    Keith

P.S.  And just for fun, today I got to teach a unit in a class I haven't had yet to some bright software engineers.

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