If you’re considering a graduate degree in health information sciences, be it health informatics or analytics, it helps to know not only the institutions that can help you achieve your goals, but the different types of programs offered.
Whether it’s a degree or certificate, a concentration or general studies program, finding the right program for you can be dependent on a lot of different things. To help you map this out, we’ve attempted to clarify an important distinction regarding the different types of programs you’re likely to encounter as you research an education in analytics.
USF Health’s online programs are facilitated by the Morsani College of Medicine, a nationally ranked, top-tier medical school. Courses are taught by industry experts and practicing professionals. To find out more about USF Health’s healthcare analytics offerings, click here.
Degrees
As a newer segment of the healthcare technology space, the development of analytics programs focused solely on healthcare has only occurred in the last few years. While there are healthcare analytics specific degrees on the market, many universities (USF included) consider the healthcare analytics discipline to be a segment of health informatics, similar to the way journalism or marketing would be segments of mass communications.
Though different, informatics and analytics are intrinsically linked. The two areas complement each other and make up the end-to-end process that data goes through in becoming actionable information. As a result, it’s not hard to see why many higher education programs keep the two linked together, as a firm grounding in healthcare and technology principles is helpful to graduates from either perspective.
Because of this, you may see a Master’s in Health Informatics with a concentration in Healthcare Analytics referred to by different names, such as MSHI Healthcare Analytics or Healthcare Analytics Master’s.
What is a Concentration?
The label of concentration merely denotes the focus of the program track you choose. In the case of USF, our online healthcare analytics program is a concentration of the Master of Science in Health Informatics degree.
This is not to say that the analytics and informatics degrees are the same, but rather similar with a slight difference. Analytics students are expected to complete some of the same “core courses” as informatics students while the bulk of their “required courses” will be different, focused on analytics concepts ranging from data mining to visualization, research and statistics for healthcare.
The concentration gives you a foundation in informatics but helps to develop a more specialized skillset fine tuned for analytics.
