New grad program inspires change

A new graduate program has made its debut this semester in the form of a health care informatics program, which focuses on information technology and the movement toward electronic medical records.

The program is the first of its kind in Florida, said interim program director Kendall Cortelyou-Ward. Students pursuing this master's degree are educated in data analysis and management. The 20-month degree program engages students through online learning, which caters to the needs of the large number of students who also work full time.

"The future of health care is electronic," Cortelyou-Ward said. "It's being able to find data and being able to make clinical and managerial decisions based upon that data that makes informatics the way of the future."

Cortelyou-Ward said informatics is one of the fastest-growing professions in the United States. She also said that there is an increasing demand for informaticians in the U.S. and for the electronic medical record initiative the Obama administration is pushing.

"The latest estimates are that there are 45,000 new jobs available today in health care informatics," said Aaron Liberman, department chair of the health management and informatics program and founder of the program. "We see a very vibrant demand for graduates in this program for many years to come."

Liberman said he is a supporter of the advancement of electronic medical records. Moreover, he said he feels strongly about the consistency converting medical records from paper form to an electronic database would bring to health-care reform.

"Practitioners anywhere in the country will be able to see the same information that the primary physician of a patient sees every day, and it will offer a consistent treatment no matter where the patient is seen," Liberman said.

Both Liberman and Cortelyou-Ward admit the idea of a seamless electronic transition from one organization to another is going to take many years to be fully effective. Liberman said many organizations already have electronic medical records internally, but the information isn't transferrable because other organizations are using different technology.

Cortelyou-Ward feels this eventual progression will lead to several innovations in the future. She said it will decrease the need for running several tests on a patient because doctors in other hospitals will have knowledge of what treatments and blood tests the patient has undergone previously. Another beneficiary will be evidence-based medicine, which is basically a pool of data that researchers can study in order to help clinicians make uniform decisions about their patients.

The informatics program received 42 applications, and 27 were accepted. The types of students that were admitted to the program included career-changers, clinicians, non-clinicians involved in health care and people with backgrounds in information technology, Cortelyou-Ward said.

Admission to the program varied greatly based on the level of the experience the students had. Students, such as graduates with bachelor's degrees in health information management or health services, didn't need to fulfill any prerequisites for the program.

However, students who came into the program as career-changers or with an information technology background had to take courses in medical terminology and U.S. health care systems.

While in the program, students learn how to track an illness and what the treatment options for that illness are. They also learn how to formulate medical records so that they're electronically consistent from one organization to another.

"Transfer of information is going to be very important in assuring that people that suffer from a particular ailment receive the same quality and level of treatment in one facility to another," Liberman said.

The students also have access to a full-scale informatics lab, which is located in Research Park. They don't have to physically visit the lab because it is accessible online, which is especially convenient for students in the program who live outside of Florida. The students use the software in order to familiarize themselves with the different technology used to make electronic medical records.

Viquar Syed, a student in the informatics program, was already interested in obtaining a master's degree before stumbling upon the program. He said he wanted to pursue something that not everyone was doing. Since Syed already had a background in information technology, he said the informatics program was a breath of fresh air to him.

"It's like a marriage between IT and health care," Syed said. "I already had the IT taken care of, so if I just add on the health care portion, I might be doing something different in the future."

Liberman is proud to say that the first class of the informatics program is a promising one. His goal was to bring in a class of students that had a fair chance of completing the program.

"We didn't want to bring in a class of students who would fail," Liberman said. "The students we admitted are the best and the brightest."