Mike Levinger
Build Your Own: CS Professor Mike Levinger Helps Students Build Healthcare Information Systems
Mike Levinger
Lecturer, Computer Science; Chief Operating and Information Officer, Primaris Healthcare
MS, Columbia University; BA, Brown University
What is your area of expertise?
My expertise is in healthcare information systems and technologies like Electronic Health Records (EHRs), hospital information systems, and integrated healthcare technologies with an emphasis on their use by healthcare providers and patients. I focus especially on the successful deployment and use of these systems and technologies.
Please tell us about your work. What are your current projects?
My company helps large healthcare providers (like hospitals), integrated delivery networks and academic medical centers access the information they need to measure and report the quality of healthcare delivery. I am also doing consulting, helping a major consumer-product company bring an innovative, consumer-oriented, connected medtech device to market.
How does the subject you work in apply in practice? What is its application?
Primaris does its work by accessing the EHRs of multiple providers. As such, we need to know and understand how these systems are deployed and accessed. We then access these systems remotely in a fully HIPAA-compliant fashion.
In other roles, I have managed the deployment of EHRs at hundreds of healthcare providers. My consulting work with the consumer medtech product is focused on the design and deployment of the IT infrastructure to support the product.
In your professional pursuits, do you stockpile ideas/observations that you can bring to the classroom in order to inform readings and projects, discussions of current issues, or other distinct challenges that require a practitioner’s perspective?
Yes, I use “real-world” examples through videos, interviews with CIOs at healthcare providers, case studies and recent articles. Given how dynamic healthcare IT is, each week I try to assign an article about that week’s topics that was published in the previous month or two. I also ask students to share examples from their work or articles that relate to the class material.
What course do you teach at MET?
I teach Electronic Health Records (MET CS 581).
Please highlight a particular project within this course that most interests your students.
The course uses a case study about the deployment of an electronic health record at a mid-sized healthcare provider as the basis for homework assignments. Each assignment applies that week’s class material to the case study. For example, students create a high-level, IT architecture for a new EHR system for the provider in the case study. The course culminates with a course project where students outline and present an overall plan to deploy the new EHR for the provider in the case.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Healthcare information systems and technologies are cutting edge. They use technologies like advanced networking, integration of mobile devices, cloud deployment, artificial intelligence and strict security. So working in this field requires staying up to date on technology to successfully use it in essential activities that not only achieve business results but improve health and save lives!