Why UXX: Since July 2012, I have been employed by UXX and I am now working as a Senior Manager, PMO, for the University of XXXX Hospital and Health Sciences System. It is time for me to complete the MS Degree in Health Informatics and I hope very much to be accepted to our program here at UXX. I am inspired not only by your program’s high rankings but also the interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum and your focus on applications of technology to the improvement of patient care and outcomes. Furthermore, since your program is online, this will facilitate my ability to excel in your program while I continue in my present position as an employee of UXX. Finally, since I am an employee of our university, my tuition is waived, which will make my graduate study affordable as well.
Understanding of HI: Both my work and my career professional interests are centered on Health Informatics, rather than Health Information Management. I am dedicated to scientific advancement in our field, not just its implementation. I hope to earn the master's at UXX so that I might learn to think more creatively about theoretical possibilities, rather than simply learning how to execute tasks in the implementation of the ideas of others. While my studies will be designed to take me beyond the job duties in which I am presently engaged, nevertheless, at the same time, they will also make me a more efficient and effective employee of UXX. The use of computers for the advancement of medicine has long been my dream and now, thanks to UXX, my dreams are within my grasp.
By being accepted into and completing your program in Health Informatics at UXX, I will receive what I seek, a world-class education on the forefront of health information management, organization, storage, retrieval, learning as much as I can about availability, accuracy, and protection of health information always geared towards supporting patient decision-making.
An example of information management would be deploying a content or document management system like what we have in UI health system. We have Cerner as the core system for the UXX health system network, and we manage patient information that is being used by a variety of individuals including doctors, coders, the HIM department etc. We have other systems as well which interact with Cerner to capture, correct, and maintain data about patients. This experience should help me to excel in your program.
I concur with Elmer Bernstam, Jack Smith, and Todd Johnson in their article, “What is Biomedical Informatics?” concluded following definition of informatics: “Informatics is the science of information, where they define ‘information’ as “data with meaning” (Bernstam, Smith, & Johnson, 2009, p. 106). Thus, I see information ‘management’ as focusing on the organization and dissemination of information, information ‘technology’ on the tool, machines, and devices, and ‘informatics’ as the optimal use of ‘meaningful data’. I take great delight in processing data and putting it into context, providing structure for the information. I take special pride in my work because of the way in which information provides the answers to “who, what, when and where”; thus, the meaning of the data.
HI Career Plan: I am convinced that I will be able to excel in your distinguished and rigorous Master's program at UXX primarily because of my extensive experience in business informatics over the course of the last 13 years of my life devoted to information management in the area of healthcare I have worked for payers, hospitals, and consulting firms and I am thankful for the diversity of opportunities that I have had professionally as this has helped me to develop creative perspectives that encompass several different facets of healthcare management. I want as much high-quality health information to be made available to doctors in real time, about particular patients, to make their efforts as successful as possible. I look forward to sharing in the development of global databases that suggest treatment plans to doctors in any part of the world, pulling only relevant data to be reported to the doctor for treatment. In this way, patient medical histories might be able to save lives as they would be accessible anywhere in the world that the patient might unexpectedly find themselves in need of medical care.
HI Degree Application: Earning the master's degree in HI dovetails very nicely with my professional experience since I have now been working for the past 13 years in healthcare information services as Project Manager and Program Manager. I handle HIPAA transactions, ICD-10 related projects, revenue cycle projects, Computer-assisted Coding (CAC, Clinical documentation Improvement (CDI), among other responsibilities. I stay abreast of rapidly changing developments in IT and healthcare, and this has been my top priority for a long time. I have seen all dimensions of healthcare from an IT perspective, and I have managed programs for ICD-10 and implemented several applications such as CAC, HIPAA related and HL7 related interfaces. I look forward to someday starting my own company in my field that provides patient data, research data, and, in fact, all relevant data to health care providers worldwide in real time using NLP (natural language process) technology.
Thank you for considering my application to your distinguished program at UXX.
MS Health Informatics Personal Purpose Statement