Dominic Thomas
Since joining Kennesaw State University’s Coles College of Business in 2018, I have taught and developed the core technical courses in the Healthcare Management and Informatics (HMI) master’s program, including HMI 7540, Healthcare Information Systems Development — a Python-oriented course built around solving real, emerging problems in healthcare with working technology.
Phil King, MSHMI ‘19, profiled by Kennesaw State News in December 2019.Phil King’s story, covered by Kennesaw State News in December 2019 under the headline “Creating Real-World Solutions,” is the kind of outcome that course is built to produce. King, a project manager for a document management company serving medical clients, was tasked in my class with building a working Python application. One of his clients — a large anesthesia practice that needed quick access to patient records and billing data scattered across multiple documents — gave him the real-world problem to solve. He built a dashboard that pulled and displayed reports that previously required hours of manual review each morning. “Somebody had to spend a couple of hours every morning checking key data points, looking at the numbers, and reporting them,” King told the university. “The dashboard I created means that, with the push of a button, they can finish a couple hours of work in five minutes.”
As I told Kennesaw State News at the time: “It is really exciting to see a student becoming an effective developer and deploying a real solution in practice within one semester. Phil was able to do that at his workplace and make a difference for his whole office.” King went on to be named the Coles College of Business’s Outstanding MSHMI Student, and worked to adapt his class project into a tool other healthcare clients could use — exactly the trajectory the course is designed to enable.
King is far from an isolated case. Projects that began in the HMI classroom have led to directed studies and a pipeline of capstone projects and job placements at organizations including Greenway Health, Accenture, United Healthcare, and MediTech. Student feedback on the course has been consistent: “One of the best classes of the program! Great content, great professor!” and “So far THE best teacher I have seen in the program… He motivates you, he teaches, he makes it fun, he makes you wonder what could you do next.”
That combination — a real client problem, a working piece of software, and a measurable efficiency gain — is the model I have tried to build into every course since, and it is a direct extension of the HMI Fellowship I have held at Coles College since 2019, supporting summer research and graduate research assistants in exactly this kind of applied healthcare technology work.