Develop a broad set of skills required by device manufacturers, healthcare providers and commissioner organisations.

Digital technologies and methodologies are considered by healthcare providers worldwide as key to meeting the significant challenges in delivering healthcare in today’s society. This has created a pressing need for a bright, well-educated and flexible workforce capable of using, evaluating and designing these technologies, with a thorough understanding of the clinical, engineering, ethical and social constraints surrounding them.

Digital healthcare concerns the development of interconnected health systems to promote the use and advancement of smart devices, new technologies, analysis techniques and communication media to help professionals and patients manage illness, enhance the performance of patient monitoring devices, improve clinical education, manage healthcare risks and promote wellbeing.

The Institute of Digital Healthcare at WMG, University of Warwick has developed this innovative Masters programme – we believe the first in the world to authoritatively review all these issues and enable students to synthesise them into a comprehensive, coherent and career-advancing experience. The MSc will give our students the skills needed to drive, manage and evaluate the advances in technology and methods that underpin digital healthcare.

You will work in supervised multi-disciplinary teams to solve complex real-world problems. The course will be taught using a flexible framework, allowing modules to be chosen from one of two specialisms (engineering or clinical) to suit the students’ background and best meet their professional development needs. 

Designed for

• Graduates with a numerate background (eg. engineering, physics, computing or informatics) who wish to launch their career in the growing digital healthcare sector by developing biomedical and healthcare system engineering skills working with healthcare technology
• Biomedical or clinical engineers and medical physicists who wish to develop innovative career pathways for themselves will find the mix of topics covered highly relevant for their career development.
• Clinicians (e.g. doctors, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals or healthcare technologists) wishing to explore the potential and impact of digital healthcare and use it to develop innovative care pathways or models of care.
• Those exploring or pursuing a PhD or research career in digital healthcare, eHealth, health or medical informatics, to advance their understanding of the principles underlying these important new technologies and how to study them

Learning Outcomes

Skills required from device manufacturers include:

• Programming and Signal Processing
• Classical Biomedical Engineering
• Research methodology
• Ethics and regulatory affairs.

Skills required by healthcare providers and commissioning organisations include:

• Clear understanding of the potential of digital healthcare to improve quality and safety of healthcare and reduce costs
• Ability to procure effective digital healthcare technologies and design appropriate implementation strategies including training, workflow redesign and evaluation design, use and procurement of digital healthcare systems and services.
• Strategic understanding of the impact of these technologies and approaches on the future nature of health professional work, health service design, public and global health

This course will allow an informed assessment of competing digital technologies and understanding of the impacts on healthcare such a technology or service might bring.

Core Modules (All Routes)

All students on both the Engineering and Clinical routes take the following five compulsory core modules.

Additional Route-Specific Core Modules

An additional three compulsory modules depend on the route taken (Engineering or Clinical)

Elective Modules

In addition to the compulsory core modules listed above, you must select sufficient elective modules to bring the total number of modules attended to ten. Students on the Engineering Route can select any of the Clinical Cores Modules. Similarly students on the Clinical Route can select their electives from the Core Engineering Route Modules. You can also choose from Computer Programming, Computational Intelligence Techniques and Information Modelling and Systems Analysis.

Project

The project is worth 50% of the final grade and supports you in developing your personal research skills. For those students wishing to obtain a Master’s degree, the dissertation project will address a current research topic or the evaluation of an emerging technology or method in digital healthcare. For example:

• Developing new neuroimaging diagnostic and evaluation tools for neurosensory rehabilitation.
• The use of monitoring and communication devices supporting people in their own homes.
• The development of new platforms to measure, analyse and communicate health data to support healthcare and promote wellbeing.
• Meeting the information and training needs of clinicians and healthcare technologists.
• Improving communication between, and the targeting of, activities by health and social care teams.

Expert, highly research-active staff will support students by helping them find a relevant topic to study, draft a project proposal, obtain ethical permission where necessary and provide appropriate supervision for their project. Often the research topic will form part of the existing research areas already active within the IDH, ensuring that the student is working within an existing research team and environment and has access to the resource of the International Digital Laboratory and wider University. The IDH also has close links with many local and distant healthcare organisations and companies, small and large, which are keen to provide projects and co-supervise students.

Learning Style

The course will be taught using a flexible framework, allowing modules to be chosen from one of two specialisms (engineering or clinical) to suit the participant’s background and best meet their professional development needs.

A multi-disciplinary group problem-based learning approach is used throughout the MSc. This means that, after an introduction to the core subjects of each topic area, students will be posed a series of challenges and questions to work on in small multi-disciplinary groups. Each group will be supervised by experienced teachers, and have access to all relevant data, IT, devices and other resources, culminating in an individual report or presentation. By working in multi-disciplinary groups across the clinical and engineering foci, all students will gain in depth understanding of the design constraints seen from both clinical and engineering perspectives. This provides unique learning and generic skills development opportunities, not offered anywhere else.

Each module will usually last one week.

Contact us

If you have questions about this course, you can contact the Admissions Office: wmgmasters@warwick.ac.uk, +44 (0)24 7657 4470