HLTH12003 Foundations of Health Information Science

Health information science refers to the language or terminologies used by health service providers and administrators to name or describe all health related concepts that need to be documented to serve a variety of purposes. Terminologies may be described as the currency for communication between the many players in any healthcare system or organisation. These terminologies therefore provide the content for health information systems whether manual or electronic. This course focuses on the collection, management, organisation, retrieval and potential use of health information and includes an overview of topics such as artificial and natural languages, health data types, standards and coding, data dictionaries, thesauri, minimum data sets, nomenclatures, coding and classification systems, healthcare message standards, data base management systems and data retrieval, characteristics of a health record and manual versus electronic record data organisation.