GEM 301 — Biostatistics and Medical Informatics

The GEM 301 module equips students with the statistical knowledge and computational skills needed for accurate decision-making in health care delivery and research, and introduces them to health and medical informatics. Biostatistics covers scales of measurement, summarising data, probability and probability distributions, estimation, hypothesis testing, chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests, t-tests and one-way analysis of variance, with correlation, regression and the statistical control of confounding, using statistical software. Epidemiology covers its history and applications, measures of morbidity and mortality, standardisation of rates, descriptive epidemiology, measures of association, screening, and the types and planning of community interventions. Demography covers population structure and pyramids and demographic measures, and community nutrition covers participatory community diagnosis and nutritional assessment. Students are introduced to community engagement and culture and health, and to the Community Based Experience and Service (COBES) programme: research methods, sampling, research ethics, rapid appraisal, community mapping, questionnaire design and pretesting, proposal design and report writing, with the principles, theories and models of health promotion and education. Health informatics covers healthcare data and computing concepts, electronic health records, standards and interoperability, data science and artificial intelligence, clinical decision support, natural language processing, safety and quality, health information exchange, telehealth, privacy and security, consumer, public health and imaging informatics, and ethics, with attention to e-health in Ghana.