The Effectiveness of Hands-on Health Informatics Skills Exercises in the Multidisciplinary Smart Home Healthcare and Health Informatics Training Laboratories

OBJECTIVE This article aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of newly established innovative smart home healthcare and health informatics laboratories, and a novel laboratory course that focuses on experiential health informatics training, and determine students' self-confidence to operate wireless home health monitoring devices before and after the hands-on laboratory course. MATERIALS AND METHODS Two web-based pretraining and posttraining questionnaires were sent to 64 students who received hands-on training with wireless remote patient monitoring devices in smart home healthcare and health informatics laboratories. RESULTS All 64 students completed the pretraining survey (100% response rate), and 49 students completed the posttraining survey (76% response rate). The quantitative data analysis showed that 95% of students had an interest in taking more hands-on laboratory courses. Sixty-seven percent of students had no prior experience with medical image, physiological data acquisition, storage, and transmission protocols. After the hands-on training session, 75.51% of students expressed improved confidence about training patients to measure blood pressure monitor using wireless devices. Ninety percent of students preferred to use a similar experiential approach in their future learning experience. Additionally, the qualitative data analysis demonstrated that students were expecting to have more courses with hands-on exercises and integration of technology-enabled delivery and patient monitoring concepts into the curriculum. CONCLUSION This study demonstrated that the multidisciplinary smart home healthcare and health informatics training laboratories and the hands-on exercises improved students' technology adoption rates and their self-confidence in using wireless patient monitoring devices.

[1]  M. Michael Shabot,et al.  AMIA Board White Paper: Program Requirements for Fellowship Education in the Subspecialty of Clinical Informatics , 2009, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[2]  R. Lindquist,et al.  Effects of problem-based learning vs. traditional lecture on Korean nursing students' critical thinking, problem-solving, and self-directed learning. , 2014, Nurse education today.

[3]  Arie Hasman,et al.  Recommendations of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) on Education in Biomedical and Health Informatics , 2010, Methods of Information in Medicine.

[4]  Marc M Triola,et al.  Health information technology and the medical school curriculum. , 2010, The American journal of managed care.

[5]  Michelle Odlum,et al.  Gap Analysis of Biomedical Informatics Graduate Education Competencies , 2013, AMIA.

[6]  J. Marc Overhage,et al.  AMIA Board White Paper: Core Content for the Subspecialty of Clinical Informatics , 2009, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[7]  William R. Hersh,et al.  Implementation and Evaluation of a Distance Learning Introductory Course in Medical Informatics , 2001, MedInfo.

[8]  Beiqun Zhao,et al.  Comparison of Lecture-Based Learning vs Discussion-Based Learning in Undergraduate Medical Students. , 2016, Journal of surgical education.

[9]  A. Gelijns,et al.  Medical innovation and institutional interdependence: rethinking university-industry connections. , 2002, JAMA.

[10]  Antonis A. Argyros,et al.  Hobbit , a care robot supporting independent living at home : First prototype and lessons learned , 2015 .

[11]  Michele Angelaccio,et al.  Remote Patient Monitoring via Non-Invasive Digital Technologies: A Systematic Review , 2017, Telemedicine journal and e-health : the official journal of the American Telemedicine Association.

[12]  V. Braun,et al.  Using thematic analysis in psychology , 2006 .

[13]  Arie Hasman,et al.  IMIA Accreditation of Health Informatics Programs , 2013, Healthcare informatics research.

[14]  M. Hill,et al.  Expanding the Role of Nurses to Improve Hypertension Care and Control Globally. , 2016, Annals of global health.

[15]  Zahir Tari,et al.  A context-aware approach for long-term behavioural change detection and abnormality prediction in ambient assisted living , 2015, Pattern Recognit..

[16]  Eta S Berner,et al.  Comparing health/medical informatics graduate program curricula against two sets of professional criteria. , 2004, Journal of healthcare information management : JHIM.

[17]  G. Demiris,et al.  Integrating problem-based learning in a nursing informatics curriculum. , 2010, Nurse education today.

[18]  Jesper Tegnér,et al.  Biomedical research in a Digital Health Framework , 2014, Journal of Translational Medicine.

[19]  M. Skubic,et al.  Older adults' attitudes towards and perceptions of ‘smart home’ technologies: a pilot study , 2004, Medical informatics and the Internet in medicine.

[20]  Alfred Winter,et al.  On Teaching International Courses on Health Information Systems , 2017, Methods of Information in Medicine.

[21]  N. Sikka,et al.  The George Washington University Emergency Medicine Telemedicine and Digital Health Fellowship. , 2014, The virtual mentor : VM.

[22]  Patrick D. Loftus,et al.  Addressing challenges of training a new generation of clinician-innovators through an interdisciplinary medical technology design program: Bench-to-Bedside , 2015, Clinical and Translational Medicine.

[23]  S. Steinhubl,et al.  Digital technology to enable aging in place , 2017, Experimental Gerontology.

[24]  Rebecca E Rdesinski,et al.  Simulated Electronic Health Record (Sim-EHR) Curriculum: Teaching EHR Skills and Use of the EHR for Disease Management and Prevention , 2014, Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

[25]  William Edward Hammond,et al.  Design and evaluation of the ONC health information technology curriculum , 2014, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[26]  Linda S. Lotto.  Qualitative Data Analysis: A Sourcebook of New Methods , 1986 .

[27]  David Tuck,et al.  White Paper: Training the Next Generation of Informaticians: The Impact of "BISTI" and Bioinformatics - A Report from the American College of Medical Informatics , 2004, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..

[28]  B. Zuckerman,et al.  Health services innovation: the time is now. , 2013, JAMA.

[29]  Paul J. Wang,et al.  Outcomes from a Postgraduate Biomedical Technology Innovation Training Program: The First 12 Years of Stanford Biodesign , 2013, Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

[30]  Eric Campo,et al.  A review of smart homes - Present state and future challenges , 2008, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[31]  G. Sweeney.  The challenge for basic science education in problem-based medical curricula. , 1999, Clinical and investigative medicine. Medecine clinique et experimentale.

[32]  E. Shortliffe,et al.  Medical informatics. An emerging academic discipline and institutional priority. , 1990, JAMA.