OER: Open Educational Resources

The GHO data repository is WHO's gateway to health-related statistics for its 194 Member States. It provides access to over 1000 indicators on priority health topics including mortality and burden of diseases, the Millennium Development Goals (child nutrition, child health, maternal and reproductive health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, neglected diseases, water and sanitation), non communicable diseases and risk factors, epidemic-prone diseases, health systems, environmental health, violence and injuries, equity among others.

Health statistics are increasingly important in measuring the nation’s overall well-being. The Census Bureau provides accurate, detailed, and up-to-date statistics—covering people and business—relating to health in America.

The BioDigital Human is an interactive 3D software platform for visualizing anatomy, disease, and treatment.

Assess your health with interactive tools such as calculators, quizzes, and questionnaires. You can check your risk for heart disease, calculate your ideal weight and body mass, find out how many calories your favorite exercise burns, and more.

Test your knowledge about health, wellness, diseases, and conditions with these quizzes.

National Institute of General Medical Sciences

World-renowned reference source and includes an interactive experience rather than a static library of books. Resources include videos, audio, animations, a drug database, and Q&A.

Human anatomy comes to life as you zoom, rotate, and explore interactive 3D models. View related reference articles and search Gale content to learn more.

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains references to journal articles in life sciences, with a concentration on biomedicine.

MedlinePlus is an online health information resource for patients and their families and friends. It is a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

MedlinePlus es un servicio informativo en línea de salud para pacientes, familiares y amigos. Es producida por la Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina de Estados Unidos, la biblioteca médica más grande del mundo y parte de los Institutos Nacionales de la Salud de EE. UU.

Features over 56,000 authoritative definitions, quick-reference appendixes, a color atlas of the human body, and more than 2,450 full-color illustrations.

A multiformat database for nursing research, clinical skills development, and curriculum support. This resource delivers a diverse mix of scholarly literature, clinical training videos, reference materials, and evidence-based resources.

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Authoritative, full-text scientific, technical and health journals, books and reference content, this platform uniquely supports an uninterrupted workflow so researchers move seamlessly among books and journals and across topics and disciplines.

BNED, BNC OER+
This course explores the U.S. health care system starting with an overview of the U.S. health care system, before analyzing how health services have evolved over time in the United States. Students will examine the Triple Aim of health care, as well as health care reform. They will also learn about various health care populations and approaches to public health, managed care, outpatient services, inpatient services, and mental health care. They will also explore the role of various health care professionals and providers, the costs associated with health care, and the role of information technology in health care. Finally, students will take a closer look at health care policy and how U.S. health care compares to other countries.

Howe, Dozier, & Dickenson (2022), University of North Georgia Press
This book is a collaborative effort among three faculty members from the Darton College of Health Professions, Nursing Department, at Albany State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), and part of the University System of Georgia. The book idea originated from a grant-funded program to create open education resources (OER) for students learning in University System of Georgia’s Major courses. The cost of education in the United States is remarkably expensive, and the added burden of purchasing textbooks for each course can be prohibitive. The opportunity to create free educational materials has been a rewarding experience. A free pdf form of this text is available for download. The authors of this book are registered nurses who have each worked 25 or more years in various roles and specialties within our healthcare system. There have been many changes throughout the years. The authors’ experience and knowledge are from a nursing perspective not found in other texts of similar content. The healthcare system has advanced tremendously since the very beginning of our formalized system. The most significant growth has been in technology use to support, diagnose, increase patient safety, and document patient outcomes. However, more can be done to ensure a system that meets all our citizens’ healthcare needs. Readers of this text will learn a brief history of our healthcare system and explore the current state of health in the U.S.

Valaitis (2023), University of West Florida Pressbooks
Welcome to Exploring the U.S. Healthcare System. This open educational resource (OER) introduces students to foundational characteristics of the U.S. healthcare system. It begins with an overview of the healthcare system that includes a brief history and a description of the current state of health in the U.S. The second chapter describes health delivery systems, including inpatient, outpatient, post-acute, long-term, palliative, and hospice care. An introduction to health insurance in the third chapter will include an overview of basic concepts, private insurance, public insurance, and recent trends. The fourth chapter presents issues related to the triple aim of improving access to care, increasing the quality of care, and lowering the cost of care. The fifth chapter reviews how the government intervenes in healthcare and presents current policy issues related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and value-based contracting. The final chapter on the topic of technology in healthcare provides an overview of health information technology, health information legislation, emerging technologies, and the future of health information technology. Chapter content is supplemented with additional material such as reports, briefs, figures, infographics, definitions, and key terms. Chapters two through six end with a “knowledge check” exercise to actively engage students with the content. While this OER book was curated and created for undergraduate students in the field of healthcare, it is my hope that it will continue to be customized to other programs and shared again.

Nelson & Greene (2023), University of West Florida Pressbooks
Welcome to Career Cornerstones: Establishing a Foundation for a Career in Healthcare. This book was created for students entering their respective health profession’s program. This book is designed to help students be successful not only in their health profession’s educational program, but also as they start to intern or work in healthcare settings.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Workforce Components includes an updated and expanded set of health IT instructional materials, funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), to help healthcare workers and others stay current in the changing healthcare environment and deliver care more effectively.
The new instructional materials are in five areas relevant to improved care delivery: population health, care coordination and interoperable health IT systems, value-based care, healthcare data analytics and patient-centered care. These areas reflect changes in the U.S. healthcare system spurred by health reform to achieve better care, smarter spending and healthier people.
In addition, 20 existing instructional modules developed under ONC’s Curriculum Development Centers program were updated. These materials are relevant to physicians, nurses and other healthcare workers who utilize health IT in care delivery, and others in the broader healthcare system.
The existing instructional modules, which have been used by more than 10,000 educators around the world to date, include History of Health IT, Maintenance of Health IT Systems, Management and Leadership for Health IT, The Culture of Healthcare and more.

Aurae Beidler (2022)

BNC OER+
In this course, you will explore laws and ethics in health care. You will start with a high-level introduction to health care law, and then will move on to examine medical ethics and making ethical decisions. From there, you will examine the health care corporate structure, as well as how health care organizations are affected by the U.S. legal system. You will learn about professional liability, medical malpractice, and defenses to liability suits. You will examine the laws surrounding medical records, as well as the concepts of informed consent, privacy, security, and fraud. You will also learn about physicians’ public duties and responsibilities and the laws surrounding health care workers. Additionally, you will explore legal and ethical issues at the beginning and end of life. Finally, you will take a closer look at legal reporting requirements and health care trends and forecasts.

Barrett, Dawson, & Ortmann (2016), Springer
Introducing public health ethics poses two special challenges. First, it is a relatively new field that combines public health and practical ethics. Its unfamiliarity requires considerable explanation, yet its scope and emergent qualities make delineation difficult. Moreover, while the early development of public health ethics occurred in a western context, its reach, like public health itself, has become global. A second challenge, then, is to articulate an approach specific enough to provide clear guidance yet sufficiently flexible and encompassing to adapt to global contexts. Broadly speaking, public health ethics helps guide practical decisions affecting population or community health based on scientific evidence and in accordance with accepted values and standards of right and wrong. In these ways, public health ethics builds on its parent disciplines of public health and ethics. This dual inheritance plays out in the definition the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers of public health ethics: “A systematic process to clarify, prioritize, and justify possible courses of public health action based on ethical principles, values and beliefs of stakeholders, and scientific and other information” (CDC 2011). Public health ethics shares with other fields of practical and professional ethics both the general theories of ethics and a common store of ethical principles, values, and beliefs. It differs from these other fields largely in the nature of challenges that public health officials typically encounter and in the ethical frameworks it employs to address these challenges. Frameworks provide methodical approaches or procedures that tailor general ethical theories, principles, values, and beliefs to the specific ethical challenges that arise in a particular field. Although no framework is definitive, many are useful, and some are especially effective in particular contexts. This chapter will conclude by setting forth a straightforward, stepwise ethics framework that provides a tool for analyzing the cases in this volume and, more importantly, one that public health practitioners have found useful in a range of contexts. For a public health practitioner, knowing how to employ an ethics framework to address a range of ethical challenges in public health—a know-how that depends on practice—is the ultimate take-home message.

Brinson et al. (2021), University of North Georgia Press

CDC
[PDF Slide Deck]

BNC OER+
This course allows students to explore health care finance. Students start by looking at an introduction to basic health care finance concepts. Within this course students will examine financial management, accounting principles in health care organizations, claims processing, as well as government payer types. Students will learn about the Affordable Care Act, Medicare prospective payment systems, hospital outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS), coding for the non-HIM professional, and revenue cycle management (RCM). This course will provide students with a full understanding about health care finance, health care fraud and abuse, electronic health records (EHR) and MACRA.

Your guide to human anatomy. Over 200 video tutorials and counting.

University of British Columbia

Betts et al. (2022), OpenStax
Anatomy and Physiology 2e is developed to meet the scope and sequence for a two-semester human anatomy and physiology course for life science and allied health majors. The book is organized by body systems. The revision focuses on inclusive and equitable instruction and includes new student support. Illustrations have been extensively revised to be clearer and more inclusive. The web-based version of Anatomy and Physiology 2e also features links to surgical videos, histology, and interactive diagrams. Please learn more about the changes by previewing the preface.

Kendra Anspaugh et al. (2022), LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network

LOUIS LMS
[Online Course]
This course is designed to teach medical terminology, the language of medicine, in an engaging and meaningful way. Learning medical terminology will allow the learner to more easily understand the language of medicine and utilize this knowledge throughout their academic and medical-based career. While learning medical terms in this course, the learner will also learn basic anatomy and physiology, as well as basic diseases and professions dealing with each body system. The course starts the learner off by explaining the way that word parts are put together and then introduces the words and their parts within each body system. The combination of word lists and their definitions with interactive content and real-world scenarios will aid the learner to understand, retain, and utilize the information within.

Nelson & Greene (2021), University of West Florida Pressbooks
Medical Terminology for Healthcare Professions is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that focuses on breaking down, pronouncing, and learning the meaning of medical terms within the context of anatomy and physiology. This resource is targeted for Healthcare Administration, Health Sciences, and Pre-Professional students.

Grimm et al. (2022)
Medical Terminology is an OER that focuses on breaking down medical terms into their word parts, pronouncing medical terms, and learning the meaning of medical terms. This resource is targeted for health services students in the first year of their college programs.

University of Hawaii Manoa (2020)
The book covers basic concepts in human nutrition, key information about essential nutrients, basic nutritional assessment, and nutrition across the lifespan.

WikiBooks
This wikibook is part of the UF Food Science and Human Nutrition Department course, Fundamentals of Human Nutrition. The instructor of this course has a PhD in human nutrition and works in both nutrition education and research. The aim of this textbook is to provide an open, trustworthy educational resource on international human nutrition. The instructor has taught at both the undergraduate and professional levels, with a strong emphasis on the incorporation of nutrition knowledge in health care and disease prevention. Their research expertise is in both nutritional biochemistry, community nutrition, and nutrition in higher education.

Jessica Kelly, OER Commons

LumenLearning

Alice Callahan et al. (2020), Lane Community College, Pressbooks
This book is designed as an Open Education Resource (OER) for introductory nutrition courses and has been adopted for use in high schools and colleges. Topics covered include basic nutrition and metabolism, information literacy, body weight and health, nutrition across life stages, dietary supplements, an in-depth look at each of the macronutrients, and major functions of vitamins and minerals.

Moore & Campbell (2021)
In this lesson students will learn basic concepts about nutrition while also exploring traditional Indigenous food practices. Students will first learn about energy balance: how the human body derives energy and nutrients from food and expends it through daily activities such as exercise. Next, they will review current recommendations for eating and exercise that promote good health. Finally, they will identify plants and animals that are native to Oregon and provided a well-rounded and nutritious diet for Indigenous people since time immemorial.

Jellum et al. (2018), University System of Georgia
Update: This open textbook was developed as part of a Round 7 Textbook Transformation Grant, revised as part of a Round 11 Mini-Grant, and revised again as part of a Round 18 Continuous Improvement Grant. This project is now considered Ancillary Materials in OpenALG due to the primary focus on ancillaries for existing OER.

Course Hero

Boyoung Chae (2018)
[Online Course]
This course introduces the emotional, physical, and mental components of health. Topics covered include goal setting, stress management, nutrition principles, health and disease relationships, substance use and abuse, safety, and fitness which incorporates various forms of physical activity. Techniques are presented to help the student incorporate a total health and fitness program into their lifestyle.

Jellum et al. (2019), University System of Georgia
This open textbook for Concepts of Fitness and Wellness at Georgia Highlands College was created through a Round Seven ALG Textbook Transformation Grant.

Richman (2022), University System of Georgia
This open textbook for lifetime wellness courses was developed as a result of a Round 19 Transformation Grant.

Sözen et al. (2016), IntechOpen
Although fitness and health have similar properties, they are, in reality, two very different concepts. While health refers to the absence of diseases, fitness refers to the degree of body functioning and the ability of the body to handle physical demands. The more efficient the body functions, the higher the level of fitness. The higher the level of fitness, the greater the chance of the body being free of diseases and maintaining a healthy state.

Flynn et al. (2018), University System of Georgia
This open textbook for Walking and Jogging for Fitness at Georgia Highlands College was created through a Round Seven ALG Textbook Transformation Grant and updated with a Round 14 Mini-Grant.

Zenko & Jones (2021), Society for Transparency, Openness, and Replication in Kinesiology
This text represents the collaboration of more than 70 authors from multiple countries. Essentials of Exercise and Sport Psychology: An Open Access Textbook brings this diverse set of experts together to provide a free, open, accessible textbook for students studying exercise and sport psychology. Primarily directed at undergraduate students, this well-referenced book is also appropriate for graduate students.
The topics covered are broad, ranging from an Introduction to Exercise Psychology (Chapter 1), to an Introduction to Sport Psychology (Chapter 19), to Working in Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology (Chapter 33). Importantly, students should recognize that each author brings their individual perspectives, experiences, and expertise to this book. Therefore, some chapters may share overlapping content, but the content is discussed in unique ways. For example, Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 focus on physical activity and exercise behavior. While content in these chapters is related, it is not redundant. To fully understand the complex world of exercise and sport psychology, students are encouraged to engage with diverse perspectives from many authors.
Chapters also contain learning exercises to prompt students and instructors to engage with the material on a deeper level. For effective review, students and instructors are encouraged to complete these learning exercises and discuss responses together.

Grindvik Nielsen et al. (2021), IntechOpen
Sports psychology is an interdisciplinary science for the purpose of increased participation in sports and physical activity to improve health and wellbeing. It addresses everything from optimal performance and wellbeing of athletes to developing mental and social aspects of participation to systemic issues associated with sports settings and organizations. This book introduces readers to topics within sports psychology with a special focus on motivation, behavior change, and personalities.

Young & nursing students, Wikibooks

MacIntosh et al. (2023), University of Calgary
This is an introductory textbook of exercise physiology, with some advanced material. It is unique in that it contains chapters on immunology, muscle cell signaling and the child in exercise physiology that are not typically contained in a book of this nature.
In-progress