Professional MSc IT in Healthcare and Life Science (IT im Gesundheitswesen)

Duration	4 terms, parallel to employment
ECTS-Points	120  (Info about ECTS)
Organizer	Calcucare Institute
Contact	Maria Schuler Phone: +43 (0)2732 893-2112,  Fax: +43 (0)2732 893-4110 E-Mail: maria.schuler@donau-uni.ac.at

Introduction

Both, healthcare systems and information technologies are changing dramatically. The former is exposed to an enormous and increasing cost pressure for example due to

Changing age structure with more elderly people requiring more and more sumptuous care More diseases that have to be diagnosed and treated with costly devices and pharmaceuticals Less people contributing to the health insurance plans (age, unemployment) Expenses for healthcare growing faster than the gross national product leading to a collapse of the healthcare system

The relevance of information technologies for healthcare systems in general, and for the research and production of pharmaceuticals and medical devices is continuously increasing. The ability to manage and utilize these technologies will be one of the most important competitive advantages and will have a major impact on the efficiency of future health care systems and product developments. Nevertheless, still more than 60% of IT projects fail to reach its targets within time and budget. International norms, laws, and guidelines in the medical field even add more complexity to these projects. This master course tries to establish a bridge between both faculties in order to outline the potential of information management in the healthcare business. It also teaches how to manage professionally IT projects in the medical field.

The idea

The study course qualifies its graduates to judge and utilize information technologies in order to improve the efficiency of the healthcare system and to successfully develop products in the business of life sciences by exploiting information technologies. The basics of health economics as well as of IT management are taught. It is the declared aspiration of this course to acquire the theories and terminologies of both disciplines not isolated from each other, but to make the students recognize information technologies as one of the tools to master the challenges of a modern healthcare system. The IT courses reflect the interdisciplinary character of this training and align with concrete remits in healthcare including the development of medical products.

Target audience

Participants The target audiences of this master course are, to give examples:

Executives of health insurance companies Managers and inspectors in health politics or official bodies Health service providers (e.g. larger hospitals, charity) Middle and upper management of pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers IT managers of companies in the healthcare business Persons responsible for IT services and information systems Software architects and programmers Persons responsible for auditing GxP Compliance in IT environments Persons in charge for design control, validation managers, software testers Persons in charge for regulatory affairs or quality assurance in clinical research

The current or future role of these might include one of the following

Efficiency analysis and improvement of healthcare systems including definition of information management and healthcare strategy Judgment or selection of clinical or information management systems Design and implementation of clinical or hospital information management systems and/or integration with/of enterprise applications Strategic application of clinical or medical information management systems, e.g. clinical trials, mining and analysis of medical/clinical data Optimization of software development processes and software quality assurance Pharmaceutical and medical device research and production Development of medical technology Enterprise integration of standard software solutions Software architecture and development (e.g. administrative and hospital information systems, online patient records, medical devices)

Even if this master course also addresses people with no particular knowledge in information technologies, still basic computer skills are required.