Health Informatics Focus Areas - One Year Later

In October 2017, the Health Informatics graduate programs at UNE Online introduced three new focus areas to give students the opportunity to shape their electives around individual career goals. Restructuring the graduate programs gave students the capability to specialize in one professional area of health informatics, ensuring a valuable return on investment. How are these focus areas helping students find career success one year later?

Focus Areas Designed to Meet Employer Needs

Health informatics continues to be one of the fastest-growing fields in healthcare, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting a 20% job growth for health information professionals by 2026. The UNE Online focus areas were developed with this growth in mind, and aimed to provide students with the skills they need to find success in their career. Learn more about what makes our focus area model unmatched.

The Heathcare Leadership focus area was designed for students who may currently work in health informatics and are looking to advance to the next level of leadership. With coursework centered around strategic planning, financial management, leadership skills, supply chain, budgeting, and economics, students in this area work towards becoming a leader in the field.

The Health Data Analytics focus area provides valuable learning as the direction of healthcare moves faster and closer to data collection and analysis. This focus area reinforces in-demand skills in the current job market. The rigorous and robust curriculum offered in this focus area teaches students how to resolve real-world healthcare issues using data mining, warehousing, and visualization. Health Data Analytics continues to be the program’s most selected focus area.

An “exabyte” is equal to one billion gigabytes.
Source: Stanford medicine, IDC, ONC

Propelled by the passage of the HITECH Act in 2009, adoption of the electronic health record (EHR) has grown substantially in the United States. Hospital adoption of EHRs reached 96% in 2017, and 87% of office-based physicians had adopted EHRs by 2015. Health informatics professionals are often needed to assist hospitals and physicians with these EHR systems.

Source: Burning Glass Technologies

New job postings for data science and analytics (DSA) jobs are anticipated to reach 2.72 million in 2020. For the past three years, Glassdoor.com named data scientist as the best job in the U.S. However, the supply of workers with data science analytics skills is not meeting demand—that’s where health informatics graduates come in.

The Training and Development focus area brings together the Graduate Programs in Health Informatics and a course offered in our Education program to deliver relevant and effective curriculum in adult learning theories and communication techniques. We provide students with visual and oral communication skills needed in IT settings to inform instructional programming. Those wishing to advance their careers in corporate training, system implementation, or education programming environments are best suited for this focus area.

Flexibility with UNE Online

The focus areas offered in the Health Informatics graduate programs equip students to graduate with the skills needed to meet the growing demand the healthcare job market is experiencing. Whether students choose our 36 credit-hour Master of Science degree or Graduate Certificate offering, UNE Online provides the flexibility to choose or change a focus area at any time.

At UNE Online, we are committed to delivering high-quality education and investing in the success of each of our students. If making adjustments to your initial academic plan is necessary, our dedicated student support team will work with you to design a new plan built for your success.