Student blogs

The new semester came with new courses: User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation & Standardisation within Health Informatics. It’ll be the first time the aspiring health informaticians will have 2 courses taught concurrently. Both courses were taught by Karolinska Institutet between 18 January 2021 and 21 March 2021.

Teachers

Contact teacher for User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation was Nadia Davoody.

Contact teachers for Standardisation within Health Informatics were Sabine Koch and Stefano Bonacina. I will add though that in the Standardisation within Health Informatics course, we had KI Health Informatic Alumni hold lectures and laboratory sessions. This gave us an interesting insight into their current work and gave us opportunity to ask questions about their experiences studying health informatics at KI and future job opportunities.  

Course Schedule

In the beginning months of the semester, User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation was predominately taught with an average of 12hours of lectures per week. The Standardisation within Health Informatics lectures were taught once a week (about 3 hours) or fortnight. After the User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation‘s major examination, the rest of the Standardisation within Health Informatics lectures and laboratory sessions were taught.

Course Themes

User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation

1. Understanding Context – Methods for data gathering & stakeholder analysis
2. User experience – Use Case Modelling & Prototyping
3. Evaluation – Evaluation Frameworks

Standardisation within Health Informatics

Lectures and laboratory sessions were organised for the following standards:

1. UMLS & SNOMED CT
2. HL7 & HL7 FHIR
3. OpenEHR
4. GDL (Guideline Definition Language)

Examination

User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation

We were split up into groups of 6 students for the whole course. There were 3 group assignments according to the aforementioned themes and then an 8hr written individual examination online.

Standardisation within Health Informatics

We had a partner to work with during the laboratory sessions and after each laboratory session, we had to make a submission. And resubmissions. And resubmissions. At least it was 3 resubmissions, for us. At the end of the course, we had an 8hr written individual examination online.

For both courses, the individual examination had the most weight in your final grade. And if I were to give you a tip, read and write FAST.

Did you enjoy the course?

User Needs, Requirements Engineering and Evaluation

I really enjoyed this course. It was conducted at a good pace. The best part for me was working closely with a relatively large and diverse team on a real case scenario. I learnt a lot from the other students, especially the technical students during the prototyping stage and was inspired by all the exciting projects.

Standardisation within Health Informatics

I always enjoy hands-on experience, so this course was actually really fun for me. I also liked the format of the course. We would normally have a lecture about a standard and then a day later, while it’s fresh in our brain, have the laboratory session where we would play around with the systems and apply them to our assignment. During this time, we would also receive help from 2^nd years or the alumni hosting the standard.

Conclusion

It was a great start to the semester! We were much more involved in group work and had some ‘real-life’ experiences.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at helen.nguyen@stud.ki.se or https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-nguyen-539782aa/