Health Informatics is a field that is gaining momentum quickly. What does Health Informatics mean exactly and why should people be interested?
Health Informatics is the intersection between technology and healthcare: it seeks to improve patient health, health care, public health, and health or biomedical related research. Adjacent fields include digital health, mobile health, telemedicine, telehealth, and health IT. While Health Informatics spans a variety of topics, relevant courses comprise of machine learning, data/text mining, natural language processing, human-computing and user interfaces, data management, and statistical or genetics courses, among others.
Health Informatics is playing a huge role in helping to improve medicine by reducing costs and bettering processes in healthcare to increase efficiency. Health Informatics also aims to make health-related information more accessible to patients and providers.
What does getting a degree in Health Informatics have to offer? Due to the expanse of topics that encompasses Health Informatics, it offers a plethora of paths and careers such as data analytics and management, research and development, consulting, data mining, health policy and management, and much more. Research topics for health informatics combine interdisciplinary subjects; students could take a route focused on policy or the entrepreneurial aspects of healthcare, or some may have interest in the human behavioral side of healthcare. Although Health Informatics is still a burgeoning field, there are many options for students to create groundbreaking roles.
RTP area offers a lot of career opportunities with companies such as RTI, Optum, SAS, RENCI, IBM, Epic, NC AHEC, and Cerner. For more career opportunities, please access the CHiP website.
