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#IOLchat Report: Online Instructor as Advisor and CounselorEach week we meet via Twitter for #IOLchat to discuss current issues related to online learning. Participants include students, instructors, eLearning companies, schools, publishers, and instructional designers. The college instructor of today takes …
Health Informatics
What Will I Learn in a Health Informatics Degree Program?
Use your interest in computer science and health in this degree program. You'll learn about computer and information science for the health care industry. Courses will focus on data integrity, computer science, information security and database management. You will also learn about coding and classifications, medical terminologies, clinical documentation and health law. You may decide to specialize in a certain area of health informatics, such as clinical informatics, public health or bioinformatics.
What Can I Do With a Health Informatics Degree?
As a health informatics professional, you can find work in many different places. Doctors' offices, research labs, hospitals, home health care services and insurance companies all have a great need for individuals who can administer health care information programs and protocols. Your job title may be patient information coordinator, data quality manager, record technician specialist or consultant. Informatics is essential to the successful operation of health care organizations as you are entrusted with patients' important data. You will typically provide support for databases, purchase informatics systems and create new ones for record keeping in a variety of health settings.
What Is the Career Outlook for Health Informatics Degree Students?
Health informatics graduates will enter a field that is doing quite well. Both the medical industry and technology are overall experiencing periods of growth, and this career combines them. Employment for medical records and health information technicians should grow much faster than the average for all occupations through 2018, and probably even beyond that. You can ensure that you will have good job opportunities by bolstering your understanding of technology and computer software, as these skills are in particular demand in health informatics. You can expect an annual wage of about $31,000, with higher salaries for those at large organizations, federal workers and health informatics professionals employed by hospitals.
