Database Apps for Health Care Pierre SD

Posted by : Molly Joss

Dear Molly: I have been a health care employee for 20 years in small offices and have an interest in further database applications in actual clinical practice. It's evident to me that the future of health care will require applications like this; hence, my interest in database studies. Your articles and advice columns on database careers frequently mention getting a start by taking college-level courses with database emphasis. But the descriptions for introductory courses are so general that they don't indicate the applications they emphasize. Could you give some specific examples of these courses to help me start the search in this field? Please help me keep up with and maybe advance IT in the medical field for the next 20 years, because I love what I do.

Molly says: Sounds as though you're trying to swallow an elephant in one gulp. Let's back up a little and make sure that you understand how databases and health care will interact before you go after general database training. After you do this, you may find you don't want to learn how to create medical databases, only to help make the specifications for such databases. You don't need database programming skills to do this, but you will need some other kinds of training.

Here's one program you might consider--it's the Medical Infomatics course offered by the National Library of Medicine. You can find out more about it from the NLM's Web site . Here's the description of the course a...

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