By Anna Gustafson
St. John’s University will offer a new baccalaureate program in health care informatics this fall, a move school officials said will help students to find jobs in one of the most rapidly growing fields in the country that has been boosted by billions of dollars in funding from the federal government.
“Health care is one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy,” said Ronald Fechter, chairman of the school’s division of computer science, mathematics and science, which will offer the new major. “The 2009 stimulus bill provided $19 billion to health care records. The whole health care information technology area is growing, and there will be a lot of investment in this area.”
President Barack Obama’s administration has invested stimulus fund dollars into setting up an electronic health records system and has especially focused on implementing the new technology in community health centers.
“Electronic health records can help reduce medical errors, make health care more efficient and improve the quality of medical care for all Americans,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a recent statement.
St. John’s officials long anticipated the merging of the information and health care fields and have been planning this program for years following a suggestion from Andrew Bartilucci, dean emeritus of the College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professionals at St. John’s. The B.S. in Healthcare Informatics was recently approved by the state Department of Education.
St. John’s, one of the first schools in the city to offer this type of major, will include classes in computer science fundamentals, health services administration, such specialized health care informatics programs as computer security — a major issue when dealing with health records — and core academic courses as part of the curriculum, Fechter said.
“Informaticians,” as they are known, will work with electronic medical record systems, create health care information management software and help develop cost-effective, high-security patient information databases.
“There’s a lot of need in the health care sector for people who are conversant in computer technology, who can speak the language of computers as well as health care,” said Bonnie MacKellar, an associate professor in the division of computer science, mathematics and science. “That’s what this program will address.”
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that 20 of the 30 fastest growing occupations in the country are computer science or health related — good news for graduates of the new program, school officials said.
“Our graduates, we think, will be very employable,” Fechter said.
For more information on the Healthcare Informatics Bachelor of Science program visit www.stjohns.edu/learnmore/01792.stj.
Reach reporter Anna Gustafson by e-mail at agustafson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
