Fall 2018

CS6440: Introduction to Health Informatics — Fall 2018

The Fall 2018 semester of the CS6440 class will begin on August 20, 2018. This page provides information about the Georgia Tech CS6440 class on Health Informatics relevant only to the Fall 2018 semester. Note that this page is subject to change at any time. Below, you will find a basic form of the course’s calendar, grading criteria, and other information. For more complete information about the course’s requirements and learning objectives, please see the general CS6440 page.

Quick Links

Class Pages: CS6440 Home | Fall 2018 Syllabus | Fall 2018 Full Calendar | Recommended Reading List

Individual Activities: Activities

Project Deliverables: D0 | D1 | D2 | D3 | D4 | D5

Course Calendar At-A-Glance

Below is a view of the calendar for the Fall 2018 CS6440 class that focuses on the graded deliverables. All of the assignment due dates are on Sundays at 11:59PM Anywhere on Earth time. We recommend changing your time zone in Canvas to show the due date in your local time. For the COMPLETE course calendar, please see the Full Course Calendar.

Week #	Week Of	Lessons	Deliverable	Assignment Due Date
1	08/20/2018	1 & 2	Introductions, Practice Activities (Welcome! & Easy Code), Start-of-Course Survey, CYU	08/26/2018
2	08/27/2018	3, 4, 5	Quiz 1, HealthVault Activity	09/02/2018
3	09/03/2018	6	Quiz 2, CYU	09/09/2018
4	09/10/2018	7	Quiz 3, Data Standards Activities (ICD, CPT, LOINC, NDC, RxNorm, SNOWMED, Data Standards)	09/16/2018
5	09/17/2018	8	Quiz 4, Project Deliverable 0, Quarter-Course Survey	09/23/2018
6	09/24/2018	9	Quiz 5, Project Deliverable 0	09/30/2018
7	10/01/2018	10	Quiz 6, Project Deliverable 1, FHIR Activities (Simple & Advanced)	10/07/2018
8	10/08/2018	11	Quiz 7, Open mHealth Activity, CYU	10/14/2018
9	10/15/2018	12	Quiz 8, Project Deliverable 2, Mid-Course Survey	10/21/2018
10	10/22/2018		i2b2 Activity	10/28/2018
11	10/29/2018			11/04/2018
12	11/05/2018		Project Deliverable 3	11/11/2018
13	11/12/2018		Third Quarter-Course Survey, CYU	11/18/2018
14	11/19/2018		Applied HI Activities (FRED, CDS Hooks, Argonaut & FHIR Path)	11/25/2018
15	11/26/2018		Project Deliverable 4, Project Deliverable 5	12/02/2018
16	12/03/2018		End-of-Course Survey, CIOS Survey, Team Evaluation	12/09/2018

Given above are the numeric labels for each lesson. For reference, here are those lessons’ titles:

Section 1: Background Information

1 Introduction to Health Informatics
2 US Healthcare
3 EHRs
4 Patient Tools
5 HIE

Section 2: Health Informatics Infrastructure

6 Data Standards
7 Interoperability Standards (Prior to FHIR)
8 Interoperability Standards (FHIR)
9 A Universal Health App Platform

Section 3: Future Facing Health Informatics Technologies

10 mHealth
11 Public and Population Health
12 Analytics and Visualization

Course Assessments

Your grade in this class is generally consists of three components: individual activities/programming exercises, a team project, and participation (quizzes, “check your understanding” evaluations and surveys). These are weighted in the final grade calculation as explained below.

Final grades will be assigned as follows:

Grades of 90pts or above will receive an A;
Grades of 80pts to 90pts will receive a B;
Grades of 70pts to 80pts will receive a C;
Grades of 60pts to 70pts will receive a D;
Grades below 60pts will receive an F.

There is no curve. Assignments and projects that are not submitted at all will be calculated as a 0.

Individual Assignments (35pts)

Activities (35pts): There are 21 required activities. These “hands on” activities enhance the material covered in each of the three sections. Each of the activities vary in weight (see the Activities page for more details). The activities are auto-graded, with outcomes at or between 0% and 100%. 0% is given for wrong or incomplete solutions, 1%-99.99% is given for those partial solutions and 100% is given for fully correct solutions. These outcomes are then converted to points. There are 2 required practice activities that are worth a total of 0 points.

Sample Scoring

FHIR Advanced Read Activity (worth 3points) with a score of 50% would be converted into 1.5pts towards the individual assignment grade (worth a total of 35pts).
FHIR Advanced Add Activity (worth 4points) with a score of 100% would be converted into 4pts towards the individual assignment grade (worth a total of 35pts).

Team Project (35pts)

There is only one project in this course: a team project, worth 35 points or 35% of your overall grade. For the team project, you will select a healthcare technology problem, by your own research or by an external mentor. At the conclusion, you will deliver a final project, graded out of 100 points, as a team that contains your final application solution.

The Team Project is comprised of 7 deliverables and a team evaluation. Each of the deliverables vary in weight (see the Team Project page for more details). The deliverables are manually graded, with outcomes between 0-100%. The deliverable grades are based on the requirements, which also serves as the rubric. These outcomes are then converted to points.

Sample Scoring

D1 (worth 3points) with a score of 95% would be converted into 2.85pts towards the team project grade (worth a total of 35pts).
D3 (worth 5points) with a score of 100% would be converted into 5.00pts towards the team project grade (worth a total of 35pts).

Participation (30pts)

Health Informatics is a growing and collaborative field, where most breakthroughs and discoveries are made by team effort. In this course, you will have the opportunity to interact with your peers, field experts and cutting edge healthcare technology. You will witness the various approaches taken by your classmates to the class’s assignments and projects. Thus, participation credit may be earned in one of three ways: by completing quizzes based on the lectures, by completing “check your understanding” evaluations and by completing the five surveys offered by the class itself. Note that all types of participation are graded not only on their quantity, but also on their quality.

Each of the deliverables vary in weight (see the Class Participation page for more details). The participation deliverables are both automatically and manually graded, with outcomes in the form of points.

Quizzes (21pts): There are eight quizzes in the course. These quizzes are individual assignments that cover the material throughout the five units. Each of the quizzes are based on the lecture material for each corresponding lesson. The quizzes are cumulative, so please keep that in mind as you complete them. The quizzes are graded on a point scale, which together comprise 21% of your grade or 21pts; thus, each quiz is weighted differently and is therefore worth a various % of your grade.
Check Your Understanding (CYU) (4pts): There are four “Check Your Understanding” evaluations in this course. These evaluations are individualized, to help you make sure you understand the basics of specific aspects of the course and requirements. The evaluations are graded on a point scale, which together comprise 4% of your grade or 4pts.

Sample Scoring

Quiz 1 (worth 2point) with a score of 1.5pts, 1.5pts will be added towards the participation grade (worth a total of 30pts).
Check Your Understanding (each worth 1point) with a score of 0.5pts, 0.5pts would be added towards the participation grade (worth a total of 30pts).
Start-of-Course Survey (worth 1point) with a score of 1pt, 1pt would be added towards the participation grade (worth a total of 30pts).

Check Your Understanding (CYU) Evaluations and Surveys are worth 1 point each and are issued throughout the duration of the course.

Stretch Assignments

(To Be Posted after Week 1)

Course Policies

The following policies are binding for this course.

Official Course Communication

You are responsible for knowing the following information:

Anything posted to this syllabus (including the pages linked from here).
Anything posted to the general course landing page.
Anything posted to Canvas
Anything emailed directly to you by the teaching team (including announcements via Piazza), 24 hours after receiving such an email.

Because Piazza announcements are emailed to you as well, you need only to check your Georgia Tech email once every 24 hours to remain up-to-date on new information during the semester. Georgia Tech generally recommends students to check their Georgia Tech email once every 24 hours. So, if an announcement or message is time sensitive, you will not be responsible for the contents of the announcement until 24 hours after it has been sent.

We generally prefer to handle communication via Piazza to help with collaboration among the teaching team, but we understand Piazza is not ideal for having information “pushed” to you. We may contact you via a private Piazza post instead of an email, but if we do so, we will choose to send email notifications immediately, bypassing your individual settings, in order to ensure you’re alerted.

Note that in three years as a Georgia Tech OMSCS instructor, I’ve encountered exactly one instance of a time-sensitive email; so, the 24-hour rule likely won’t ever be relevant. As with other things, however, we believe it’s better to be clear at the beginning rather than write policies later.

Note that this means you won’t be responsible for knowing information communicated in several other methods we’ll be using. You aren’t responsible for knowing anything posted to Piazza that isn’t linked from an official announcement. You aren’t responsible for anything said in Slack, or other third-party sites we may sometimes use to communicate with students. You don’t need to worry about missing critical information so long as you keep up with your email and understand the documents on this web site.

Office Hours

This semester, we’ll be using Slack for office hours. If you are unaware, Slack is a popular team communication chat tool that allows conversations in public rooms, private rooms, and private messages. Slack office hours are times when the instructor and/or one or more teaching assistants will be available on the dedicated CS6440 student Slack community. You can sign up for the student Slack community at omscs6440.slack.com.

During Slack office hours, the instructor and/or teaching assistants in attendance will be available for conversations in the public #office-hours channel, or in private one-on-one channels. You are also encouraged to use the Slack community for discussions, project work, or anything else. The instructors and/or TAs will be available during office hours, but they may also be available at other times as well.

To find when office hours for OMS CS6440 are being held, check the office hours calendar or the weekly announcements. Changes to any given office hours session on the calendar will always be made at least 24 hours in advance; if late changes are needed, they’ll be announced with a Piazza announcement. If you are not comfortable signing up for Slack to participate in Slack office hours, you may also feel free to email or post privately on Piazza to set up a chat via an alternate technology at the same time. If you would like to participate in office hours but are unable to make the given times, feel free to email or post privately on Piazza and we’ll try our best to accommodate you.

Late Work

Running such a large class involves a detailed workflow for assigning assignments to graders, grading those assignments, and returning those grades. As such, work that does not enter into that workflow presents a major delay. Thus, we cannot accept any late work in this class. All assignments must be submitted by the posted deadlines. If you have technical difficulties submitting the assignment to Canvas, post privately to Piazza immediately and attach your submission.

If you have an emergency and absolutely cannot submit an assignment by the posted deadlines, we ask you to go through the Dean of Students’ office regarding class absences with in 48 hours of the cause or incident. The Dean of Students is equipped to address emergencies that we lack the resources to address. Additionally, the Dean of Students office can coordinate with you and alert all your classes together instead of requiring you to contact each professor individually. You may find information on contacting the Dean of Students with regard to personal emergencies here: https://gatech-advocate.symplicity.com/care_report/

The Dean of Students is there to be an advocate and partner for you when you’re in a crisis; we wholeheartedly recommend taking advantage of this resource if you are in need. Justifiable excuses here would involve any major unforeseen disruption to your classwork, such as illnesses, injuries, deaths, and births, all for either you or your family. If you find that you will miss a significant portion of the course due to any one of theses excuses, we highly advise dropping the course if you will not be able to catch up. Note that for foreseen but unavoidable conflicts, like weddings, business trips, and conferences, you should complete your work in advance; this is why we have made sure to provide all assignment and project resources in advance. If you have such a conflict specifically with the tests, let us know and we’ll try to work with you. Unfortunately, team projects are hard to make up so if your TA mentor finds that there isn’t much you could do to make up aiding in a project, we will work to assign you an “Incomplete” for the course.

(also See “Stretch Assignments” above)

Academic Honesty

In general, we strongly encourage collaboration in this class. You are encouraged to discuss the course material, the activities, the written assignments, and project with your classmates, both before and after assignments and projects are due. Similarly, we will be posting the best assignments for public viewing so you may learn from the success of others’ designs.

However, we draw a firm line regarding what copying is permissible in your assignments. Specifically, you must adhere to the following rules:

Any content that is copied or barely paraphrased from existing literature in healthcare or health informatics must be cited, both in the references at the conclusion of your assignment and in-line where the borrowed material appears. Failing to provide in-line citations for borrowed material will be regarded as plagiarism even if the source is provided in the references. This applies to figures as well as text, including those figures that are part of this course’s material. Any cited content greater than two sentences need to be properly cited and rewritten in your own words.
Do not copy any content from other students in current or previous semesters of Introduction to Health Informatics or Health Informatics in the Cloud, even if cited.
Each Essay and Programming Assignment will be reviewed with applicable plagiarism tools.

In all written work, sources should be cited in APA style, both in-line and at the end of the document. Please consult the Purdue OWL for information on when and how to cite sources in research. When in doubt, don’t hesitate to ask!