Board of Trustees approves new master's degree program

The UCF Board of Trustees unanimously approved a self-sufficient master's degree program in healthcare that is the first in Florida.

"We know that this is a bad budget climate, so you may ask why on Earth are we developing a new program when our budgets are so poor," Patricia Bishop, vice provost and dean of the College of Graduate Studies said to the board. "This program is designed to be totally and completely financially self-sufficient."

Bishop went on to say that the healthcare informatics program, which teaches medical transcription and billing, would not conflict with any programs at UCF. Students will be charged about $300 per student credit hour and a $478 fee per credit hour as well.

"The maintenance of the informatics lab can be costly as well so those fees would go toward the maintenance of our informatics lab, which is already established but with students getting into it would require upkeep," Kendall Cortelyou-Ward, interim program director for the healthcare informatics degree said to the board.

The federal stimulus plan has $19 billion aimed at modernizing medical records and creating jobs in this particular field.

Bishop said there is a great deal of funding for healthcare informatics because of the shortage of abled workers in this field.

"Our program is designed to be a 36-hour master's program that will be taught online and delivered online in a 16-month period primarily to part-time students," said Patricia Bishop, vice provost and dean of the College of Graduate Studies, to the board.

Ten faculty members are available and will teach one class per year, and there will be two courses a semester offered in the program, which has 11 pending applications for the fall.

"It's amazing people didn't know if we had a program so they'd call and ask if we were going to have one," Cortelyou-Ward said.

The first two courses to be taught are Healthcare Informatics and Information Technology, and Biostatistcs and Decision Analysis in Healthcare.

"This has been designed so students can get in and out of this program quickly," Bishop told the board.

She also noted that there are 6,000 open job positions nationally for these degrees and that as a nation 2,600 students are graduated each year.

"Actually the president's commission on healthcare indicates that over the next six years there will be actually 40,000 new positions to support this field, so the opportunity is vibrant," Aaron Liberman, chairman for the department of health management and informatics told the board.

There are about 10 healthcare informatics programs nationally that are accredited, Liberman said. The program will be seeking accreditation in 2011.

"Continuing education is going to begin looking a whole lot like corporate education," Vice Provost Terry Hickey said to the board.

"We're thrilled," Liberman said about the board's approval.