At this point, I began to pursue computer science as an alternative major, although I still considered medical school a possibility. Once I learned more about the field, I felt that the academic trajectory of medicine was too restrictive for me. As a doctor, you are forced to follow protocols—a good doctor knows more of them, but doesn’t typically develop them. If you try inventing a method by inappropriately experimenting on a patient, you might provoke litigation (and rightly so). The protocols are coming out of research labs, not practicums. I wasn’t interested in more memorization. I wanted to be an inventor.
Extending Computer Science Background Into Healthcare
Combining medicine and computer science can help significantly improve the healthcare system in the United States. Interdisciplinary efforts between the fields of computer science and medicine can influence medical research, accelerate healthcare progress, expand communication and further education. Algorithms and advanced technologies can enhance medical care to reach more people and process increasing amounts of information. The field of health informatics examines the use of computer science in the medical industry.
The online Master of Science in Health Informatics (MHI) program from Northern Kentucky University (NKU) focuses on applied knowledge and is responsive to increasing market opportunities. This online program is about reimagining healthcare with resources such as artificial intelligence (AI), mHealth, data visualization and the Internet of Things (IoT). Students will learn the systems, science and software behind new technologies and applications using health data to enhance delivery and drive innovation in healthcare.
Healthcare Informatics and Computer Science Within the Medical Field
Health informatics is a growing field that can improve healthcare in various ways. Some examples include digital health, data analysis, medical decision-making, telemedicine, computational modeling and electronic medical records. Using computer software enables researchers to analyze large data sets and find patterns in medical information. Software and algorithms can assist with medical decision-making based on collected data and clinical findings, and telemedicine increases access to care for those who experience difficulties accessing medical care. These techniques are incorporated into overall public health by planning solutions and opportunities and defining data standards with health domain integration.
The use of health informatics is crucial in both clinical and managerial settings. Those in administrative positions will benefit from utilizing various information systems to modify data and interpret information to make critical decisions. Informatics can also aid with time management, but healthcare professionals should ensure they don’t feel overwhelmed by the extensive communication tools.
As a wide-ranging field, health informatics typically breaks down into the categories of public health, consumer health, clinical research, translational and clinical informatics:
- Public health informatics. Public health informatics uses information from population data and applies it to public healthcare. Computers can gather, examine and respond to large data sets.
- Consumer health informatics. Consumer health informatics uses computer technology to strengthen a patient’s experience with medical care. For example, mobile apps, web portals and wearable devices can help patients schedule appointments, fill out paperwork and answer surveys.
- Clinical research informatics. Computer technology uses information gathered from studies to improve the healthcare system. Computer science plays a key role in research to collect data and interpret the results.
- Translational informatics. Translational informatics utilizes computers to analyze and store genomic and biomedical data. Complex data sets can be easily interpreted with modeling, algorithms and simulations.
- Clinical informatics. Computer science can positively impact disease diagnosis and medical decision-making. By studying how artificial intelligence can enhance algorithmic processes, researchers can make it easier for doctors to diagnose patients and plan the correct treatments.
About NKU’s Online Master of Science in Health Informatics
Students in NKU’s online MHI program will gain the knowledge and skills to analyze, unite and enhance healthcare information systems, quality of care and healthcare processes. Students will learn data analysis techniques, research methods, support care coordination, population health reform, information governance best practices to improve health outcomes and how to enable patient care. By learning about clinical informatics, students will discover how the integration and interoperability of healthcare systems are driving change and the move to value-based care.
Have a question or concern about this article? Please contact us.
Why I became a computer scientist instead of a doctor
When I dropped out of medical school in 2007, it happened in two stages: the first, administrative and fairly straightforward; the second, emotional and more complex.
When I made the decision to drop out, I was a 20-year-old medical student at Tehran University, finishing up my second year. (In Iran, you start medical school directly after high school and study for seven-and-a-half years.) A year later, I enrolled as a freshman at MIT. Logically speaking, I could have done pre-med and gone on to medical school in the US. This stage could have been merely an administrative change. I was swapping my school and country, not the ultimate goal of becoming a doctor.
However, when I started at MIT, I was utterly disappointed with the pre-med culture and requirements—as well as the way biology was taught—even at this top technical school.
If you are not familiar with pre-med culture, here is my take on it: As a pre-med student in the US, you generally have to take two years worth of courses and requirements as prescribed by the medical schools. While some of these are useful, and certainly relevant to your career as a doctor (like introductory biology, or experience shadowing a doctor), the requirements themselves are somewhat strict. Worse, medical school admissions committees obsess over grades in those particular courses.
Students worry about taking those classes with others who might be smarter (stressing over how they might affect the curve), picking professors by how many As they hand out, and other concerns that are not really relevant to their medical goals. What many don’t really think about is what actually interests them. In fact, my first point of departure from the pre-med track happened during my second semester at MIT, when I decided to enroll in a more difficult offering of electromagnetic physics, despite being strongly advised by the pre-med counseling office not to do so. They were worried about the higher risk of a B grade. I refused to take the advice, as I considered my learning experience more important than the possibility of getting a grade that would mark me as “about average.” (I did get a B in the end, with no regrets.)
In my opinion, this approach selects for the wrong type of doctor—a shallow and competitive one. A doctor who has not learned how to make mistakes and learn from them. A doctor who is never given the chance to challenge herself, take risks, discover her real strengths and weaknesses.
Honestly, I think a future surgeon would benefit much more from taking a sculpture or anatomical drawing class, a fossil analysis lab, or even acting, than, say, differential calculus. The current pre-med system in the US just doesn’t leave much room for broader, interdisciplinary paths to a career in medicine. After all, aspiring doctors will acquire the critical skills once they get to medical school—so why not ease the requirements and let them explore potentially complementary knowledge or skill sets? I assure you, 90% of med-school graduates can’t recall even a third of what they learned in undergraduate organic chemistry. But an improv course might help them learn to think on their feet.
Some schools have started offering BS-MD programs, and I suspect the reasoning behind it is to free students from the unnecessary strictures of pre-med, and allow for broader academic exploration on the way to medical school. It has its own downsides —for instance, accepting the students at 18 with less knowledge of their potential as a doctor or genuine interest in medicine (and an early commitment for a student)— but at least it’s an institutional acknowledgment of this very problem.
In my opinion, medicine isn’t about competing with others or personal success. It’s about helping people, and the right approach to helping people is a collaborative one. The job market for physicians is far from saturated, and the pay is decent for most doctors. But the current system for medical training doesn’t reinforce collaboration. It fosters academic and professional insecurity. The result is a field flooded with overly competitive people who aren’t in medical school for the right reasons.
As mentioned, I also take issue with the manner in which undergraduate biology is taught. Biology was the field I initially intended to study at MIT, but I soon felt that many courses weren’t about understanding the material—they were about memorization. I wasn’t comprehending ideas, I was storing information. It lacked depth, it lacked insight—so much so that many quantitatively minded students chose to postpone enrollment until their last semester. (Introductory biology is a school-wide requirement at MIT.)
This wasn’t the biology I knew and loved. Sure, higher level coursework started to delve deeper, and provide insights; but as pre-med students, we weren’t really encouraged to take those. Especially challenging courses were to be avoided like the plague—no B grades! The consensus among many pre-med kids was that we wanted it this way: easy, and memorizable. A good majority wanted their As and enough time to buff up their resumes with other things that medical schools consider sexy, such as halfhearted community-service engagements solely meant to impress admissions committees.
Biology and medicine are full of questions. But the way it was taught, even at MIT, didn’t encourage much inquiry at all. Frankly, I was offered a more exciting approach to biology in high school, which is how I became interested in medicine in the first place. For instance, in high school, I learned why DNA is transcribed (and assembled) from its 5′-end to the 3′-end. (It has to do with nucleotides being activated by the phosphate group.) It’s not always possible to understand the reasons behind mechanisms, and some memorization is inevitable, but reducing biology to regurgitated facts deprives it of its beauty.
When I was taught how the genetic code could be deciphered in high school, I was actually given a mock-up of the data that the Nobel-prize winning biochemist Har Gobind Khorana used to figure out that the codons come in triplets! I expected a similarly exploratory approach at MIT, but instead, the first quiz in biochemistry was to memorize the chemical structure of all 20 amino acids. Boring!
At this point, I began to pursue computer science as an alternative major, although I still considered medical school a possibility. Once I learned more about the field, I felt that the academic trajectory of medicine was too restrictive for me. As a doctor, you are forced to follow protocols—a good doctor knows more of them, but doesn’t typically develop them. If you try inventing a method by inappropriately experimenting on a patient, you might provoke litigation (and rightly so). The protocols are coming out of research labs, not practicums. I wasn’t interested in more memorization. I wanted to be an inventor.
I have returned to biology for my PhD at Harvard, hoping to answer the questions that actually excite me, using modern quantitative approaches. In my current research I am using mathematical models to describe biological systems and their evolution.
Maybe, in the distant future, my research will actually have some impact on medicine. Because, I must say, I still have a little void in my heart for not following through on medical school. My grandfather was a doctor who devoted his entire life to working in a rural area, and 30 years after his death people, still speak highly of him and the services he rendered. Missing out on that aspect of medicine, directly improving people’s lives, is my biggest regret. I love the profession, I just loathed the path to it.
Things are improving, however. Biology is becoming more and more quantitative in its approaches to research and innovation, and the future of medical education will become increasingly about critical thinking, rather than rote memorization. Especially with the availability of medical search engines and online libraries (which provide easy access to data), medical-assistant software and increasing reliance on para-clinical technology (MRI, blood tests, sonography, genetic screening), the key role of the “human-in-the loop” (the doctor), will be to provide the analytic insight to patients and their loved ones.
Shifting focus toward inquiry-based curricula means medical schools will be getting more applicants who are genuinely excited about solving problems. If this change in methodology is recognized by medical schools and undergraduate pre-med programs alike, I would say the future of medicine, and clinical research, is a bright one indeed.
📬 Sign up for the Daily Brief
Our free, fast, and fun briefing on the global economy, delivered every weekday morning.
