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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Appl Clin Inform 2025; 16(02): 305-313
DOI: 10.1055/a-2482-9071
Special Topic on Teaching and Training Future Health Informaticians

Managing the Transition from Tradition to Innovation for the Heidelberg/Heilbronn Medical Informatics Master of Science Program

Petra Knaup
1   Heidelberg University, Institute of Medical Informatics, Heidelberg, Germany
,
Rolf Bendl
2   Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences, Heilbronn, Germany
,
Urs Eisenmann
1   Heidelberg University, Institute of Medical Informatics, Heidelberg, Germany
,
Mark Hastenteufel
3   Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim, Germany
,
Alexandra Reichenbach
2   Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences, Heilbronn, Germany
› Author Affiliations Funding None.
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Abstract

Background To keep pace with the developments in the medical informatics field, the curriculum of the Heidelberg/Heilbronn Medical Informatics Master of Science program is continuously updated. In its latest revision we restructured our master's program to allow more flexibility to accommodate updates and include current topics and to enable students' choices.

Objectives This study aimed to present our new concepts for graduate medical informatics education, share our experiences, and provide insights into the perception of these concepts by advanced students and graduates.

Methods Our new curriculum consists of three core components: Areas of concentration that bundle elective courses in an important domain of medical informatics, a large catalog of elective courses, and introductory/alignment courses for students without a bachelor's degree in medical informatics. We conducted an online survey of graduates and students with at least 75 credits to assess their opinion on the program's effectiveness and attractiveness.

Results Mandatory courses include clinical medicine, project management, research, and practical training in biomedical informatics. Five areas of concentration bundle elective courses for 30 credits to provide a solid foundation in an important domain in medical informatics. These are bioinformatics, data science, computer-aided diagnosis and therapy systems, information management, and software engineering in medicine. The catalog of electives offers a total of 67 courses. About 75% of the courses are assigned to more than one area of concentration. Our survey demonstrates that the participants highly appreciate the flexibility of the electives and the opportunity to develop an area of expertise.

Conclusion Offering a high degree of flexibility to our students has motivated them to join our program and resulted in a high level of student satisfaction. By designing the curriculum with areas of concentration and providing an infrastructure that permits courses on emerging topics to be added easily to the curriculum, we were able to meet our students' expectations.

Keywords

education - medical informatics - professional training - master of science program - curriculum - strategies for health IT training - workforce

Protection of Human and Animal Subjects

The survey among students and graduates was performed in compliance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki on Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects.


Ethical Approval

The survey was presented to the ethics committee of Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. It was implemented with the online survey tool SoSci (SoSci Survey GmbH, Munich, Germany).


Supplementary Material



Publication History

Received: 18 March 2024

Accepted: 30 September 2024

Accepted Manuscript online:
25 November 2024

Article published online:
09 April 2025

© 2025. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Oswald-Hesse-Straße 50, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

 

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