Key dates
Learn more
Student experience
Overview
Embedded in the prestigious University of Melbourne Medical Faculty, this course gives you access to world-class facilities and learning material to help you develop expertise in health informatics, the scientific foundation of digital health.
While studying the Graduate Certificate of Health Informatics and Digital Health, you will build connections with like-minded peers, active practitioners and industry-leading educators.
Day-to-day experience
This program has a structure enabling you to build your skills at your own pace, studying part-time while working. There is flexibility to fit your learning around your professional schedule and capacity over a period of one or more years.
The program facilitates shared learning experiences, and you and your diverse cohort will undertake invaluable peer-to-peer learning. You will deepen your understanding of how digital information and communication technologies can improve health outcomes and transform health service delivery.
The program consistently links current issues in the Australian digital health context with internationally informed thinking and evidence. This will help you develop a critical understanding of new professional roles and emerging organisational models.
Learning mode
In-depth and up-to-date resources ensure that the learning you do while in the program is sophisticated and relevant. With substantial learning materials and well-respected expert faculty, you’ll be equipped with practical knowledge and skills that are in high demand.
You can begin the Graduate Certificate of Health Informatics and Digital Health by taking a single subject, through the Community Access Program. This versatility allows you to acquire a micro-credential that can give you an immediate advantage in increasingly digital healthcare settings.
Opportunities
In this program, you will develop the necessary learning to pursue further study at a Masters level. You will take many of the same subjects as Master of Information Systems (Health specialisation) students and mingle with them. Networking opportunities throughout the course will enable you to connect with leading Australian practitioners across various fields. The University of Melbourne encourages you to take advantage of these opportunities to help you make informed decisions around pursuing further study.
As a student of the Graduate Certificate in Health Informatics and Digital Health, you’ll have access to exciting seminars and meetings where researchers unfold innovations and discoveries in the field, such as artificial intelligence in medicine, health data cybersecurity, and the Internet of Health Things.
Kate Bailey
Kate Bailey took on the challenge of studying while working multiple jobs during the height of the pandemic. She says it has paid off and is looking forward to beginning a career in digital health after completing a Graduate Certificate in Health Informatics and Digital Health.
Kate is working as an Occupational Therapist but also works as an emergency department care co-ordinator at the Austin and as a COVID Care Navigator at Eastern Health. In looking to study she was keen to be enable change and improve outcomes for both clinicians and patients.
While being frustrated with the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems she had been using and knowing that the projects she had been involved with needed quality management, her mind turned to digital health as a field that sparked her interest. She felt that study in this area could give her the skills to make other clinicians life better, improve communication and patient outcomes.
"I especially enjoyed learning about data and categorising things to make sure we have consistent and streamlined data. Often in health records there can be lots of inconsistency and abbreviations which nobody knows what they mean! The same information is often gathered by mutiple people in the patient’s journey but it’s all over the place and it makes it very difficult if not impossible to use.
I’m just about to start a new role in a quality position in an EMR team, so I will get to use my new approach and learning in my day to day role. I’ve proposed a project on emergency triage making sure we have the right information from the get go. Having that information follow the patient from the start and building on that throughout the patient’s stay. It’s my first digital health role and I feel that without having done the course I wouldn’t be making this change. I have learnt many useful things in this course to apply straight away to my roles as a healthcare professional also.
Just doing the course, I’ve met so many like minded people. It really extended my network and even though it was mostly online learning through COVID, I’ve made good connections. It’s exciting to have a group of people working toward similar goals. It’s been a big bonus. The course is quite small and not many people know about it. I say it’s about using technology and data to improve healthcare and then people understand it.
I was really happy with the range of learning in the course. We looked at digital health and where it’s come from, how people shared information and then how the data and communication has improved. We’ve looked at the research for health informatics and how to conduct the research ourselves. There was lots of small group learning – a bit like a multi-disciplinary team. There have been mistakes in health projects because health people haven’t been involved. I now feel I can really contribute to a project and understand how I can add value to it and make it a success.
Sometimes I was out of my comfort zone but it was enjoyable to learn new things and I’m sure it will come up again. It was great to work co-operatively in a team and it mimics how I work day to day."