Earn Your Master's Degree in Health Informatics in as Few as 18 months.
WHY HEALTH INFORMATICS
In 2004, the Bush administration acknowledged that our health care system faced major challenges:
"Health care spending and health insurance premiums continue to rise at rates much higher than the rate of inflation. Despite spending over $1.6 trillion on health care as a Nation, there are still serious concerns about preventable errors, uneven health care quality, and poor communication among doctors, hospitals, and many other health care providers involved in the care of any one person... All these problems – high costs, uncertain value, medical errors, variable quality, administrative inefficiencies, and poor coordination – are closely connected to our failure to use health information technology as an integral part of medical care."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/technology
/economic_policy200404/chap3.html
What role does health informatics (HI) play in this? Health informatics is a rich and diverse field with important contributions from many disciplines, including health care, information technology, and business administration. At the present time, there is no one, perfect definition of health informatics Some describe it as the use of information technology to improve health care delivery. Others say it is the integration of information into clinical workflow to improve patient outcomes; still others speak of it in terms of how health information is shared, transmitted, managed, and utilized. All will agree that health informatics is a dynamic discipline at the forefront of change in health care. Health informatics experts will be the facilitators of this change.
At UIC, we view health informatics through the lens of patient-based health care information systems. Students receive a skill set applicable to the HI field, looking more closely at systems analysis, implementation and management, rather than the more technical aspects of systems, such as programming and software development. Our courses cover health care business and administrative processes, as well as IT and clinical processes. Of particular interest to us are the socio-cultural and behavioral perspectives of individuals, groups, and organizations as they interact within the contexts of health care information systems and supporting technologies.
UIC identifies the need for two groups of highly competent HI professionals: HI field professionals who are grounded in the current best practices of HI to resolve the immediate problems and issues in the delivery of health care goods and services, as well as HI research professionals to create frameworks for examining and identifying what constitutes the evidence for best HI practices for optimal healthcare delivery. Our health informatics course-only track provides a focus on those skills that make a student--with an HI-related work background-- immediately valuable to his/her workplace. Our research tracks provide the skills necessary to guide the long-term improvement of HI practices in those organizations that are willing and ready to optimize their delivery of health care through the use of technology.
For more information, please visit our professional organizations at http://himss.org, http://www.ahima.org, and http://www.amia.org.
