Developing an interdisciplinary Health Informatics Security and privacy program

Health informatics is one of the nation´s largest growing industries. To protect health information systems, it is extremely important for health informatics professionals to be well educated and trained in information assurance, and to understand the many concerns of security, privacy, integrity and reliability. To meet this demand, we are creating a new, interdisciplinary curriculum model of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BSCS) concentration in Health Informatics Security and Privacy (HISP) at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University (NC A&T). To establish this BSCS concentration in HISP, we developed a new course on health information systems in the Department of Computer Science, a new course on Mathematics for Health Informatics in the Department of Mathematics, and modified an existing course in the Department of Management to include topics on business practices relating to health information technology. We also developed three course modules on health informatics security and privacy and are integrating these course modules into the existing information assurance courses in the Department of Computer Science. This paper describes the new curriculum, the new courses, and the three course modules we have developed.