Master of Health Care Informatics

Curriculum

Completion of the Master of Health Care Informatics degree requires 36 credit hours (12 courses). HCI500 is recommended as the first course in the HCI program and is a pre-requisite for HCI508 and HCI535. Toward the end of the program, students are required to take HCI599 Health Care Informatics Capstone. Any 10 of the remaining 14 courses listed below may be selected.

Students may be eligible to transfer up to 18 credit hours from previous graduate study. Talk with an admissions advisor to learn more about the transcript evaluation process.

As with nearly every industry, the effective use of data is the primary driver for an organization's pursuit of performance and quality improvements and cost management. Professionals who have the ability to work with disparate data sets to generate an accurate and actionable presentation of health care systems will be at the forefront of the health care industry's successful change.

The main growth estimates and current needs are driven by CIOs and organizational needs for qualified staff with health informatics degrees to assume roles across the spectrum of HCIT capabilities, with informatics professionals providing a critical role given the burgeoning growth of clinical, genomic and billing data.

The Accountable Care Act (ACA) and other legislation will be the largest driver of HCIT investment and workforce needs, due in large part to:

• The Conversion of ICD-9 to ICD-10, which has 10 times the number of diagnostic and procedure codes as ICD-9.
• The HITECH Act, which includes the ONC Health IT Workforce Development Program.
• Meaningful Use, which refers to the provisions in the HITECH Act that authorize incentive payments through Medicare and Medicaid to providers that use electronic health records in such a way that significantly improves clinical care.
• Accountable care organizations, which focus on efficiently delivered patient outcomes and will require significant IT infrastructure and interoperability to exchange data from the various provider settings.
• The Patient-Centered Medical Home, a health care setting that facilitates partnerships between patients, their physicians, and when appropriate, the patients’ families, which will be facilitated by registries, IT, health information exchanges and other means to ensure that patients get their indicated care.
• Government regulations that impact reimbursement, incentives and penalties for achieving compliance by specified dates.

Other drivers in this career category include:

• The rise of health information exchanges
• The aging of the population will have a significant impact on health care spending growth
• The move to value-based reimbursement
• The advent of telemedicine and "smart hospitals"

In addition to health care reform, the health care IT industry is also impacted by many trends, including technology evolution; reimbursement changes; staffing needs; consolidation across vendors, providers, and payers; privacy and security concerns; new and innovative care delivery models, and the drive to leverage innovative health analytics to ensure efficient delivery of quality care and service.

American Sentinel's master of science in health informatics online not only teaches students two skill sets (health care informatics and information systems analytics), but demonstrates how to apply them in two different ways: the utilization of data and the preparation of data. Our graduates become independent resources who not only gather disparate data, but make it usable for decision-making purposes, thereby better preparing them for these job positions.

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