Objective
Medical information system, which recently is implemented in large number of medical institutes, contains tremendous amount of electronic medical data related to daily medical practice. Such kind of data is not only used in diagnosis directly, but also expected to be utilized for understanding transition in morbidity for diseases which progress over a long period of time, such as lifestyle-related diseases, and applying for anticipation in medical research field based on cross-disciplinary analysis on large number of cases. For example, it is expected that such kind of data can be applied for “pathological condition prediction”, “treatment evaluation”, “diagnosis assistance” and “rare symptoms detection”.
In order to realize such utilization of data, it is required that there is human resources who acquire medical knowledge helping understand pathological conditions based on data, knowledge of mathematical statistics and information sciences enabling to quantitatively write reports on relationship between data and pathological conditions with considering uncertainty and ability to analyze medical data by using those kinds of knowledge fully.
At Kochi Medical School, there is database for educational and research purpose containing anonymous medical data that has been collected since Kochi Medical School developed integrated medical information system as the first hospital information system in Japan in 1981 on its own. Information Healthcare Science Course provides graduate students with education to train ability to analyze electronic medical data by applying the anonymous medical data for graduate school education and by close collaboration of supervisors whose specialties are fundamental medical science, clinical medical science and medical information related to Medicine Program. The goal of the course is to contribute to realization of predictive medicine and to improve quality of medicine, by growing human resources who can utilize electronic medical data collected in various medical institutes to predict transition in morbidity and discover cause of diseases.
As mentioned above, “Information Healthcare Science Course” aims to grow human resources who do not only merely deal with information about medical science, but can utilize medical information to widen edge of medical knowledge.
To achieve the above goal, we recruit graduate students targeting those who have graduated from university providing the course related to medicine, dentistry, 6-year pharmacology or veterinary medicine or those who have master’s degree of medicine or science related graduate school, or those who have acquired fundamental mathematics by completing econometrics or medical economics in master’s course at economics related graduate school. Additionally, we recruit graduate students who have interest in new discipline; for instance, those who are willing to contribute to research and application of data analysis related to medicine and medical science with their disciplinary background in science and engineering such as information science, or with disciplinary background in medicine, dentistry, pharmacology, biology or agriculture. After admission, students will experience flexible education considering differences in disciplinary background of each student.
The below list shows what kind of human resources Information Healthcare Course aims to grow.
- We will grow human resources who have rich human nature and deep ethics, can analyze data with methodology in abiding ethical guidance and laws in terms of medical research, and can contribute to society as a result.
- We will grow human resources who acquire knowledge broadly and deeply and ability to think cross-disciplinary, have sophisticated ability to conduct research to contribute internationally at university or research institute, and have ability to apply knowledge flexibly to contribute at company as sophisticated professional.
- We will grow human resources who have perspective of applying results of research to medicine and can promote translational research.