Today, we are the largest graduate program in this area, and one of only a few accredited graduate programs in health and informatics. We are proud of this accomplishment, particularly because our health and informatics graduate program is delivered totally online. The mission of the department of biomedical and health information sciences is to advance the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of health care through improved generation, management and communication of biomedical and other health care data.

The UIC degree has really given me the confidence to move forward in my career and to know that I can go into any setting and discuss the challenges in healthcare and the solutions with just about anybody within the industry. It’s given me the knowledge and the opportunity to learn from others what experiences they’ve had and to share thoughts and ideas about moving the industry forward to create better patient outcomes.

After graduating, my career plans are to take the knowledge that I’ve obtained and move it further. I’ve been an independent consultant for a few years now and I’ve taken the next pledge, the next leap forward to set myself up officially as a company and grow the consultancy. I hope to acquire interesting projects, ones that I feel are really impacting the industry and work with interesting people who can help to attain better results in healthcare.

If someone asked me about the program, I would definitely tell them to go for it if they feel they’ve reached a point in their career where they can learn more and take that knowledge and use it right away. The UIC Health Infomatics program is a strong one. It encourages collaboration. It encourages sharing of experiences. It really makes you realize that even though you thought you knew a lot about the industry, there is more to learn. There is always more to learn. What’s nice about it is you do get to learn from your fellow students in groups or in class discussions and you learn a whole lot from the professors and the faculty who are all there to help you use the information you have, do further research and discuss amongst yourselves and learn from each other.

It’s a very strong program. You learn from clinicians. You learn from business management, from vendors, as well as suppliers, from all walks of life, as you will, in the healthcare industry. There’s a lot that this program teaches you that you can apply almost immediately. It’s been great for my career and for my personal growth as well.

I chose UIC, I see you held the Informatics Program because first of all, it is an accredited program, it’s well known, the instructors all are experts in their field and the flexibility of having an online program where I can access it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anytime was excellent. With the family, a job and being a mom it really helped me get through.

Obtaining this degree in Health to Informatics has really assisted me in helping my patients get a better understanding of how electronic medical records were positively impact their life. Their day to day interactions with their physicians and nurses will get them involved more closely than what they used to be before used to be a period of time where the physicians had total control over the patients charts and their care. Now, the push is for the patient to interact more and have more control over their own health. I believe obtaining this degree helped me propel that. It will help me just teach them and educate them on how they could effectively affect their lives by interacting with Health Informatics and taking control of their own life.

What I got out of this degree or what was the most beneficial to me was the fact that I got a chance to interact with not only nurses like myself but physicians, pharmacist, IT specialist, who could actually help me gain knowledge that I never thought I’d have. We had discussions daily that actually helped me get a clear grasp on what IT would consist of as far as this Health Informatics degree. Having that 24 hour flexibility, being able to interact back and forth with each individual really helped expand my knowledge base and really helped propel me to another level in nursing and in Health Informatics.

As far as how it has affected me as a nurse in my career, I’m looking forward to a degree that can take me in more of a manager’s position possibly a CIO position, Chief Information Officer position, clinical analyst position, anything where I can get my nursing degree and also this IT piece and merge it to help our health care system expand and help people on a whole another level.

I would recommend UIC’s Health Informatics Program to anyone that was looking to expand their knowledge base on health information. Develop a better understanding of ICD9 codes or how we are just going to expand as a health care system as a whole. UIC offering me flexibility as far as the 24 hour access to the internet, excellent instructors, students or my colleagues who are excellent resources as far as questions or concerns that I had, maybe I didn’t understand a project or an assignment, we all got together collaboratively and got through it, so that’s why I would recommend UIC's excellent program.