Summary
Objectives: Health informatics is a well established and important multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary
field that not only involves informatics but also medicine, nursing, engineering,
biology and other-related subjects. The program has been organized on the basis of
an inter-university approach with the participation of five Greek universities. The
paper aims at providing a current description of the academic program and a preliminary
evaluation of the implementation phase.
Methods: The paper presents a case study of a curriculum implementation from the phase of
curriculum development to the phase of implementation and evaluation. Due to the interdisciplinary
character of the course appropriate procedures were undertaken to ensure that mixed
backgrounds can assimilate the broad spectrum of the teaching material taught. In
the first stages of the implementation international students mainly from Europe attended
the course. In addition, local graduates provided an extra dimension to the multi-layered
difficulties and challenges of such a course implementation.
Results: The students registered in the course were from different backgrounds and disciplines.
They were mainly from health sciences and engineering schools. The interdisciplinary
arrangement of the course facilitated the proper exchange of thoughts, skills, and
knowledge among and between students and teachers.
Conclusions: The postgraduate course in health informatics at the University of Athens has now
been running for more than fifteen consecutive years and is one of the first and longest
standing courses in Europe. Continuous evaluation and adaptation is required to fit
within the changing and evolving amazing field of biomedical and health informatics.
Keywords
Health informatics - inter-university academic programs - health and medical informatics
education
