The purpose of this assignment is to increase your awareness and knowledge of informatics theories, methods, technologies, or applications beyond those covered in our course readings, assignments, and discussion. This assignment aligns with course objective 2: Identify the current state of development of major areas within health informatics.

For this assignment, you should choose an informatics theory, method, technology, or application that was not covered in class and create a short handout to teach your peers about your chosen informatics concept. Examples might include new content on social media and their role in clinical practice; methods for eliciting user information needs (e.g., cognitive task analysis, beyond what was included in readings); innovative data visualization tools; a data repository or database site that we did not discuss; tools for evaluating health IT; novel data mining applications for a problem or clinical area; new applications or technologies to support telehealth, etc. Think about topics that would likely be of interest or use to your peers (i.e. avoid topics that would only be relevant to a few for example, a new technology that can only be used/applied in a very narrow and specific practice context and isnt generalizable to other practice areas might not be ideal).

In your handout you should:

Identify the theory/method/technology or application topic that you selected (provide links to tools or references where appropriate).
Provide a brief description of your topic and how it relates to nursing informatics. Be specific. In your description, position your topic relative to other concepts/topics weve discussed in class. For example, if your topic was goal directed task analysis, you would need to describe what this method is, why it is used, and why it is relevant to health informatics. If it helps, you can use a figure or image to help describe your topic.
Briefly address how this topic might be relevant to your future career how would you use it? Or, how might others use it to help improve the design of healthcare systems/technologies for your practice?
What are the key take-aways your peers should learn relative to your topic?
Provide references or links where your peers could go to learn more about your topic?
Hand-outs should be limited to 1-2 pages (shoot for 1 unless you have a lot of references/links or large images/figures).

You can use bullets, text boxes, images, or other tools to help format your hand-out to make it readable and allow the reader to quickly glean relevant information.

Upload an electronic copy of your hand-out (ideally as a pdf, but can be a Word or PowerPoint file) to the discussion board by 11:59pm on Sunday. Bring a hard copy or your laptop to class as well.

During class, we will have round-table presentations of your topics. Each student will have approximately 10 minutes to present your topic and answer questions from your peers.