Greetings from Dr. Yellowlees

2008 and 2009 have been 2 years of exciting advances for the Health Informatics Program.  We continue to be proud of our ever growing graduate group of teaching faculty, from the School of Medicine, School of Veterinary Medicine, College of Engineering, Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, and the Health Sciences Library.

We have expanded our masters student population to 17 students this Spring, and are proud of all our students for pursuing excellence in the classroom, their research, and their professional careers.  We have a large number of other applicants to the course for next year and it continues to be an honor to be associated with such a high caliber of professionals. We are particularly pleased to have had an enthusiastic enrollment of 30 students in our online certificate program run in conjunction with UC Davis Extension and welcome all of these new students. Among this group we have 12 nurses from several states and we are especially pleased to have attracted such an excellent number of budding nurse informaticists.

Among the many new developments to be particularly enthusiastic about this coming year, are our successful affiliations and teaching collaborations with other UC Davis and UC Davis Health System entities, a few of which are as follows:

• UC Davis Extension:  We are now offering our fully online Health Informatics Certificate Program and look forward to seeing more students enrolling in this exciting program over the next year.
• New School of Public Health:  We are excited to partner with the new School of Public Health, in creating an area of expertise in informatics for the public health students, and of course, an area of expertise in Public Health will be developed for our Masters students.
•  Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing:  A close collaboration with the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing will not only bring reciprocating areas of "designated emphasis" to both our programs as we plan our mutual Ph.D. programs but will bring new nursing faculty into our graduate group of teaching faculty where we expect a significant increase in our master's students with nursing backgrounds!

We have a booth at the upcoming national conferences in Nursing Informatics (Las Vegas - April 23-24) and the American Telemedicine Association (Las Vegas - April 25-28) and hope to see both potential students and faculty at these meetings. We are working with the Betty Irene School of Nursing to find at least one faculty in Nursing Informatics and seek expressions of interest to Dr Yellowlees.

Indeed, this is a year of many accomplishments, but as always, the most rewarding and memorable accomplishment for our entire group is that of the graduating class.  Please join me in congratulating all of our upcoming graduates this year, and wish them a highly successful and rewarding career.

We welcome your interest in our discipline, our mission and our organization.  We invite you to explore our website to learn more about health informatics and its role in the strategic vision of the UC Davis Health System, and it's role in our community. You can also find us on facebook, and a number of our faculty are developing blogs and other social networking initiatives. See you there.!!