Experiences with the Practical Use of Care2x in Medical Informatics Education (Reverse Engineering)

In this chapter the authors report about their experiences in education of both students of healthcare engineering at Graz University of Applied Sciences, and students of medicine at the Medical University Graz, gained during the winter term 2004. Care2x is an open source Web-based integrated healthcare environment (IHE). It allows the integration of data, information, functions, and workflows in one environment. The system is currently consisting of four major components, which can also function independently: hospital information system (HIS), practice management (PM), a central data server (CDS) and a health exchange protocol (HXP). Although the components are under heavy development, the HIS has reached a degree of stability, where one can use it at least for educational purposes. Various groups also report the usage of enhanced versions of Care2x in real life settings. Our experiences in both—very different—student groups have been very promising. In both groups the acceptance was high and Care2x provided good insights into the principles of a hospital information system. The medical students learned the principal handling of a HIS, whereas the engineering students had the possibility to go deeper into technical details.