Data Analytics: Healthcare Applications Pathway

The healthcare applications pathway integrates study of data analytics with key areas of public health, medical terminology, U.S. healthcare systems, and healthcare IT, including Electronic Medical Records (EMR) applications.

This pathway equips students with the skills needed for data-intensive roles in the healthcare sector (research assistant, health insurance analyst, healthcare quality analyst, and other data-focused positions) or to pursue further study in healthcare administration, public health, and related fields at the baccalaureate level and beyond.

This pathway is available 100% online and has on campus options as well for interested students.

Career Pathways

An associates degree in the healthcare applications pathway would be sufficient for employment in a data intensive applied healthcare administrative job.  Examples of job titles at this level would include:

• Medical records analyst
• Cancer/tumor registrar
• Healthcare information technician
• Healthcare claims researcher
• Research assistant
• Patient care representative
• Clinical data coordinator

With a 4-year degree in health data analytics or related field (such as healthcare administration, public health, or biostatistics) graduates could obtain a variety of mid-level jobs involving management and analytics such as:

• Quality assurance analyst
• Healthcare data analyst
• Clinical data analyst
• Research associate
• Operations analyst (healthcare)
• SAS programmer (medical/pharmaceutical)

With a graduate level degree in healthcare analytics multiple senior and director level opportunities are available. Career opportunities will expand due to the inclusion of AI applications in healthcare. Advanced job titles include:

• Biostatistician
• Healthcare data scientist
• AI research scientist (healthcare)
• AI ethics compliance manager (healthcare)
• Senior research analyst
• Chief data officer
• Data analytics director

Healthcare Applications Pathway

FIRST YEAR – FALL SEMESTER

FIRST YEAR – SPRING SEMESTER

SECOND YEAR – FALL SEMESTER

SECOND YEAR – SPRING SEMESTER

Upon the completion of the degree in Data Analytics, graduates will be able to:

1. Identify data sources, types of data, and data structures, including structured and unstructured data.
2. Remediate raw data as appropriate before analysis including cleaning and restructuring data using software tools and programming skills.
3. Collect and combine data from multiple sources using database programming (SQL) and related skills.
4. Use analytical tools to identify patterns and relationships in data sets including time trends, cluster analysis, association analysis, classification, and statistical associations and relations.
5. Apply data analytics to address real-world problems and communicate results to stakeholders
6. Visually communicate patterns and relations in data applying best practices of data visualization.
7. Identify legal and ethical issues in analyzing data and adhere to ethical standards.

The data analytics degree program is open admissions and has no prerequisites for students to begin coursework.  Students are required to have a computer meeting the technical specifications necessary to run analytical software. Most software packages used in the program are open source, provided by the college or available at nominal cost to students.  When possible, freely available open educational resources are utilized in coursework thus minimizing student cost.