HSLS Participates in New Public Health Informatics Course
HSLS librarians and Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) professors have collaborated to design a 3-credit classes titled PUBHLT 2010: Online public health – Informatics and Intervention. Offered for the first time this fall term, the course is team taught by HSLS librarians Ammon Ripple, Patricia Friedman and Fran Yarger, as well as Dr. Anthony Silvestre and Michael Shankle from the department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at GSPH.
Photo L-R: Ammon Ripple, HSLS librarian, Anthony Silvestre and Michael Shankle, GSPH department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, team teach the new public health informatics course.
The course offers intensive training in information retrieval, an introduction to Web development, and graphics management skills designed to help students create online public health interventions. Students learn:
- Advanced information retrieval skills, focusing on Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed
- Which databases contain public health-related literature in other disciplines
- Best practices for information retrieval on the World Wide Web
- Management of bibliographic information using EndNote Software
- Basic HTML and Web design skills
- Graphics management with Adobe Photoshop
- Presentation management with Microsoft PowerPoint (and how to publish presentations online)
- Basics of health communication theory
- Usefulness of the Internet as a medium for interventions with marginalized and/or stigmatized populations, with case studies
- How to collect public health research data using the Internet
The combined expertise of faculty librarians and public health teaching faculty provides students with a more robust learning experience. Students gain a better understanding of information behaviors and health behaviors, both of which are essential to the successful development of online health interventions. The final project requires students to research a health topic that affects a specific population, and to design an online intervention using the skills acquired in the course.
Among other positive feedback, students report that they feel more confident and efficient when searching the literature, that their newly acquired skills have been appreciated in their workplace, and that they feel like they could carry on a more “educated conversation” with Web designers and information technology professionals.
A paper on this collaborative effort was presented at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in November by the course faculty. The course will be offered again in fall 2004.
-Ammon Ripple
