Ongoing Curriculum/Course Development Activities
HIM Course/Curriculum Update
- Co-PIs from the Department of Health Information Management held multiple faculty meetings and created a curriculum for the SAHI track in the HIM graduate program, based on the proposed work.
- The curriculum is here (Courses in bold are required courses).
- The PIs also gave a presentation about the project and the new curriculum at AHIMA Assembly on Education 2015.
- The PIs Introduced the track to students and one student already started to take courses at IS.
- Added Security and Privacy content in Telemedicine course (HRS 2432). The instructor (Dr. Andi Saptono) included a discussion on security and privacy issues when it introduces technologies used in telemedicine and eHealth in the whole class. At the same time, he invited guest lecturer (Dr. Valerie Watzlaf) to deliver a lecture about health record security and privacy particularly. We plan to review and refine content, including addition of additional content
- PI Zhou included one discussion session about genomic information security and privacy in the start to work on the update of the genomics class (HRS 2425: old name: Genomics and Personalized Medicine in Health Information Systems, new name: Data Analytics and its applications in Genomics). A few students also wrote term papers on this topic.
- Two high school projects from HIM Co-PIs have been accepted by the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy. Please see here for more information.
SIS Course/Curriculum Update
Course lectures: As part of the INFSCI 2150: Information Security & Privacy course, we have added 3 new lectures related to healthcare privacy (in Fall, 2014). The lectures covered various topics of user privacy including data and location privacy with a significant focus on healthcare related private data release. The lectures were designed to first introduce k-anonymization based techniques for private data disclosure. The lectures covered various known attacks on k-anonymity based solutions and discussed enhancements to fix them such as l-diversity and t-closeness. Both tabular data and graph datasets were considered in the lectures. Finally, the lectures covered differential privacy concepts and its application to protecting data privacy in healthcare data. This content is being updated in INFSCI 2150 this Fall.
Student Mini-presentations on Healthcare Security & Privacy: As part of the INFSCI 2150: Information Security & Privacy course, students presented mini-presentations on various topics of healthcare security including mobile healthcare, healthcare interconnection networks, and healthcare data security in cloud computing environments. Each presentation was done by a group of 2 students and it accounted for 10% of their grades in the course. The presentations were shared among the students and it was part of the course material.
New Lab module - Data Privacy lab: We have included a new lab module focused on data anonymization using the UT Dallas Anonymization toolbox. Students in this lab were given a dataset and were asked to anonymize it with a given criteria. Students were then asked to identify the potential vulnerabilities in the anonymized dataset and were asked to identify the possible sensitive information from the anonymized dataset. Another component of this lab module required the students to enhance the anonymization criteria using l-diversity and t-closeness constraints and were asked to demonstrate the increased privacy protection in the anonymized version. Other lab modules are being developed this Fall, 2015. In particular, we just recruited two PhD students in the School of Information Sciences who will work on the labs development this Fall; and also assist in modules.
TELCOM 2825 Information Systems and Network Infrastructure Protection course has been revised to include a unit on HIPPA regulations and how it impacts cybersecurity and ICT risk management. The key focus here is Risk Management aspect with emphasis on healthcare domain as a critical infrastructure. (Taught by Co-PI Tipper)
In Advanced Cryptography (offered in Spring, 2015), research papers related to Seurity&Privacy in Healthcare were assigned as assignment. Some materials will be used to develop some modules for the Cryptography course (being offered in Spring, 2016). Both these courses are taught by Co-PI Krishnamurthy)
As part of INFSCI 2621Security Managementcourse (Spring, 2015), research paper presentations from students included four papers on Security and Privacy in Healthcare. PI had two teams work on Term paper related to the Security Management in Health Sciences with focus on IT environments. These are being used to create modules for other courses and will be included in refined module in INFSCI 2621 course in Spring, 2016.
Tracks and Curriculum Development Work
Develop SHAI curriculum in SAHI areas as follows
Curriculum Development and Changes in SIS Graduate Programs
We assume that students who are interested in SAHI will need background/expertise in a variety of areas. The knowledge and skills they will need fall in four areas: programming, operating systems and databases, system design/analysis, and distributed systems, with focus on HIT. Such pre-requisite skills are available through a combination of existing courses in the BSIS, MSIS and MST curricula. The follow pictures depict the new tracks that will be created for the MSIS and MST programs, respectively
New Advanced Courses SAHI for SAIS/SAHI Electives
Curriculum Development and Changes in HIM Graduate Program
We propose to a new track on Healthcare Security and Privacy (HS&P) in the HIM graduate program
HIS Plan of Studies (41 – 42 total credits)**
| Course# | Title of Course | Credit |
| HRS 2420 | Intro to Health Information Systems* (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2421 | Security, Privacy & Legal Issues of HIS* (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2422 | Computer Programming for Hlth Informatics (SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2423 | Cloud Computing, HL7 and Analytics in HC (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2424 | Data Base Mgmt in Health Care*(SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2425 | Data Analytics & Applications in Genomics (SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2426 | Evaluation of Classification Systems (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2428 | Software Engineering Project Mgmt*(Su-1) | 3 |
| HRS 2431 | Evaluation Methods in Health Info (Su-1) | 3 |
| HRS 2432 | Telemedicine, Telerehab & e-Health (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2434 | Business Issues/Data Analytics in Hlth Care (Su-2) | 3 |
| HRS 2439 | Health Information Systems Internship*(Any) | 3 |
| HRS 2490 | Electronic Health Records* (SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2901 | Intro to Research Methodology (SP) | 3 |
| Statistics (HRS 2910, BIOST 2011, 2041, 2042, PSYED 2018) (Any) | 3 | |
| INFSCI 2150 | Introduction to Security Δ (F) | 3 |
| INFSCI 2731 | Security in E-Commerce Δ (SP) | 3 |
| INFSCI 2621 | Security Management (SP) | 3 |
| INFSCI 2620 | Developing Secure Systems (SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2435 | Financial Management Foundations (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2445 | Human Resource Management (SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2465 | FHuman Factors in Leadership (SP) | 3 |
| HRS 2454 | Lean Six Sigma for Healthcare Management (Su-2) | 3 |
| HRS 2902/03 | Issues in the Health System / Topics in Health Care (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2905 | Ethical Issues in Health Care (F) | 3 |
| HRS 2924 | Graduate Research Proposal | 3 |
| HRS 2925 | Graduate Research | 3 |
Laboratory Exercises and Test-bed for Education and Research in SAHI
We propose to develop a set of lab exercises to support the proposed SAHI curriculum