Designing and Delivering a Public Health Informatics Course

Public health is a discipline increasingly reliant on the dissemination, manipulation and synthesis of information from a variety of sources. Public health practitioners now do much of their surveillance, advocacy, reporting, data analysis, and data collection via the web or on a computer. However, students in Master of Public Health programs rarely receive adequate training on the use of information technology. This article reports on the issues involved in designing and delivering an informatics course for public health students, using Public Health Informatics, a class offered since the fall of 1998 at the Texas A&M University System Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health, as an example. Informatics, public health informatics, issues in course design and delivery, and future plans for the course are defined and discussed.