The Health Informatics Center of Acadiana (HICA) at UL Lafayette was
created in the Spring of 1999 to complement the health-related educational
and research missions of the University and to connect traditional public
health agencies and Louisiana's vital healthcare industry. "Health
Informatics" is the applied science that uses computer and communications
technologies to gather and analyze health data, and to disseminate health
information to clinical and administrative decision makers. The Center serves
students, faculty, healthcare providers, and the public at large, while
positioning UL Lafayette at the forefront of an extremely critical field.
The mission of the Health Informatics Center of Acadiana at UL Lafayette is four-fold. |
- To augment the education of health professionals and healthcare administrators
at the undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education levels;
- To provide an avenue for scholarly research into community health needs
and into the effectiveness of the healthcare community's response
to those needs;
- To serve the goals of Lafayette and Acadiana in access to healthcare
and in improving public health generally, especially within Region
IV of the Office of Public Health, and to serve as a vital resource to "healthy
communities" initiatives throughout the State of Louisiana; and
- To fulfill community-information requirements of healthcare providers
in Region IV, and to aid policymakers and statewide professional
and trade associations in matters relating to healthcare delivery and financing.
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Louisiana has not ranked better than 46th among states since ReliaStar
began publication of its State Health Rankings index in 1990. To achieve
measurable improvements, architects of public policy and private healthcare
providers alike need better access to accurate and timely population-based
information. UL Lafayette has created HICA as a vehicle for leveraging the
collective intellectual capital of its faculty, students, and private-sector
partners. The Louisiana Turning Point Project, funded jointly by the Robert
Wood Johnson and W. K. Kellogg foundations, published a deliverable entitled "Louisiana's
Health Improvement Plan" at the end of 1999. This publication prioritized
the enhancement of the capacity and competence of the broadly defined "public
health system" in the areas of health assessment through improvements
in information and communication. HICA serves as a laboratory for reengineering
the collection, analysis, and dissemination of health status information
in Louisiana. In this task, HICA capitalizes on its strong relationship
with "healthy communities" programs in the area, especially the
Partnership for a Healthier Lafayette. The Lafayette Community Health Consortium,
the Acadiana Medical Research Foundation, the Southwest Louisiana Area Health
Education Center, and the Office of Public Health in the Louisiana Department
of Health and Hospitals are all on record in support of UL Lafayette's role.
HICA will continue to develop and utilize academic-community-industry partnerships
to obtain, aggregate, analyze, and report on data and methodologies to benefit
the health status of Louisiana communities and thereby to enhance the health
status of the entire State.
The Health Informatics Center of Acadiana at UL Lafayette serves as a focal point
for interdisciplinary curricular, research, and grant-seeking activities benefiting
students and faculty in several colleges at the University, especially the colleges
of Business Administration, Sciences,
and Nursing. Academic programs
in Health Information Management,
Health Care Administration, Insurance & Risk Management, Nursing, Emergency
Health Science, Communicative
Disorders, Dietetics, and Health Education are the principal collaborators
with Programs in Statistics, Computer
Science, and Telecommunications also
participating in health-related applications. Even during its planning stages,
HICA was instrumental in attracting private endowments for two $1,000,000 Chairs
-- tangible evidence of community willingness to partner with UL Lafayette in
this field. The Louisiana Health System-funded J. Robert Rivet MD Chair in Health
Informatics and the Acadian Ambulance Chair in Telehealth will speed the creation
of an interdisciplinary Master of Science degree program in Health Informatics
at UL Lafayette. |
