Health Informatics and Electronic Health Records

# Health Informatics and Electronic Health Records Your EHR is supposed to help deliver better, safer care. Instead, clinicians spend half their day fighting it. Data sits siloed in separate systems. Patients have no visibility into their own records. Privacy risks aren't caught until a breach happens. And the vendor you chose five years ago is now locking you in. This course teaches you how to think like an informaticist: someone who bridges clinical knowledge, technology, and data to actually make healthcare systems work better. Whether you're a clinician frustrated by EHR design, an IT professional building integrations, a health administrator trying to improve outcomes, or an analyst learning to extract value from EHR data, you'll learn the principles that underpin modern health informatics. Not vendor-specific features — the underlying standards (HL7, FHIR, DICOM), the regulatory frameworks (HIPAA, security), the usability science that determines clinician adoption, and the methodologies (analytics, decision support, workflow redesign) that turn data into improved care. You'll understand why FHIR adoption is finally happening, what data governance really means, how to assess privacy risks before they become breaches, why clinical workflows don't fit generic software, and what it takes to build an EHR system that doesn't drive clinicians to workarounds. This is a course about how healthcare technology actually works — not the marketing version, but the real version, with its trade-offs, its complexity, and its enormous impact on patient safety and clinician burnout. You'll finish with a mental model of modern health IT that lets you read a technical standard, understand an EHR implementation problem, assess a vendor contract, and ask the right questions about data quality, interoperability, and care improvement.