Medical Informatics Unit

History

By 1998, faculty members from the UP College of Medicine began taking formal courses in medical informatics in different institutions around the world; in particular, at the University of Washington, the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, and University of Warwick in Coventry, England. These faculty members served as the core group of what will be the Medical Informatics Unit at UP Manila.

Upon return, the faculty core group started working on health information systems projects and applied many of the principles they learned from their training. Most of these researches were conducted at the Medical Informatics Unit of the UP College of Medicine while others at the World Health Organization and the Department of Health.

With the experience from these projects, faculty members were able to refine their techniques and protocols to address the growing informatics needs of the country. One such project was the Community Health Information Tracking System, a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP-based system released under the general public license (GPL). CHITS was named finalist at the Stockholm Challenge 2006 and one of top three e-government projects in the Philippines by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Digital Opportunity Center.

Several other projects with the United States Agency for International Development and International Development Research of Canada provided the experience for the faculty and staff of the MIU to handle increasingly complex projects in medical informatics.

By 2003, the faculty members realized the need to generate new blood and to formulate a structured learning program for medical informatics. A proposal for a Master of Science in health informatics was crafted together with the College of Arts and Sciences (who had a program in bioinformatics). This combined program, now called Master of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI) was finally approved in 2004 and implemented in academic year 2005-2006.

Aside from offering the MS Health Informatics medical informatics track, the Medical Informatics Unit also coordinates e-learning initiatives in the UP College of Medicine.