Assessment:
In discussion with the course coordinator the students should choose a patient pathway to study, ideally one that relates to a chronic condition (in other words a condition that is long term and could involve a patient interacting with many different parts of the health service over a period of time). Typical examples of a chronic care pathway would be conditions such as asthma, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, dementias etc.
It is expected that you will work as a group in researching the topic, but then produce an individual report based on the information you uncover. In particular it is expected that you should explore a number of themes in the work you do in researching the essay:
The appropriate use of medical terminologies
The computational infrastructure supporting data capture
The computational infrastructure supporting data sharing
Human factors associated in the use of the electronic patient records
An assessment of the impact of electronic patient records
The report should cover the basic aspects of the disease, the patient pathway, the data capture challenges, the data sharing challenges and human factor issues. There should be some detail given of some of the coding used in the disease process, and some detail of the data sharing. This is to show that you have an understanding at a more detailed level of data capture and data sharing.
This should then be the basic for an analysis of the pathway that could focus on issues such as:
An identification of the data silos on what might be done to address the issues they cause.
An analysis of where an mHealth solution might make things better for a patient
An analysis of the challenges that might be faced in developing a patient dashboard for the disease area.
A comparison of the patient management process in two different countries, for example comparing and contrasting diabetes care pathways in the UK vs Saudi Arabia.
The mark sheet gives details of what is expected in each of these areas.
The length of the report should not exceed 3,000 words.