• College of Public Health and Health Informatics 

The Healthcare profession has become increasingly reliant upon Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This has resulted in a significant technology gap between those professionals entrusted to provide clinical care and those who are in charge of managing the complex information systems required to operate modern healthcare systems. Such a gap threatens the effective and efficient management of healthcare information. The need to use ICT in healthcare has resulted in a new science called Health Informatics (HI) which is a socio-technical discipline concerned with the use of ICT to support the delivery of healthcare. It is a broad discipline which includes many subjects such as bio-informatics, electronic patient records, telemedicine, clinical decision making, etc.  The Master of Science in Health Informatics program is designed to prepare graduates with state of the art technical and humanistic skills in health informatics (HI), thus fill the increasing demands in the field.  Graduates of this program will carry out very specific roles as informaticians who are able to work in public and private health care systems to overall management, planning, and implementation and provide solutions to barriers associated with implementation of HI applications.

The mission of the program is to advance the quality and efficiency of the Saudi health care services through improved information management. A major objective of the program is to provide students with an understanding of the multifaceted, interdisciplinary nature of computing applications and its use in healthcare.

The program is designed based on national and international accreditation standards. Nationally; the program is approved by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties. In addition, the program is based on standards from the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM).

All students enrolled in the program are required to complete forty-two credits with a non-thesis track, where students are required to submit a graduation project at the last year of study under the supervision of a faculty member. Courses are chosen with the advisor and a plan of study is developed to enable each student to design an in-depth study of Health Informatics taking into account student's previous academic preparation and experience.  Most of our courses are only offered once per academic year.  If a student fails to successfully complete a course, he/she must retake the course the next academic year.  Furthermore, this may also prevent the student from registering for the advanced-level courses and delay the date of graduation.