What Can You Do With a Health Informatics Degree?

Health informatics is an innovative field that combines healthcare, technology, and management to improve patient outcomes. As a career, it’s a rewarding path that allows you to exercise technical skills and offers a comfortable salary with the opportunity to improve patients’ lives. The first step to becoming a health informatics professional is to obtain a relevant degree. However, it’s important to know whether this field is right for you before pursuing any education.

Health Informatics Careers

Health informatics is instrumental in improving patient outcomes and offers several career paths that support other positions within the healthcare industry. These professionals help to develop and maintain the software, hardware, and technology used in the healthcare system. There are several rewarding career paths in this field, the biggest of which “are going to be the ones managing the systems, and the analysis of data coming from these systems, in a way that supports clinical work,” says Jay Spitulnik, associate teaching professor and director of Northeastern University’s Master of Science in Health Informatics.

Top Careers in the Industry

The top careers in the health informatics industry include:

• Health/clinical informatics specialists
• Clinical informatics analysts
• Clinical informatics managers/directors
• Testing analysts
• Project managers
• Bioinformatics scientists
• Biostatisticians

Professional Roles and Approaches

These roles have a variety of approaches to health informatics. “Clinical informatics specialists are the ones who are really dealing with the immediate healthcare coverage,” Spitulnik says. On the other hand, “Bioinformatics is more heavily geared toward a research-based approach, not a practical application approach.”

Top Jobs With Health Informatics Skills

While there are several in-demand roles in the health informatics industry, a variety of additional careers benefit from in-demand skills a healthcare informatics master’s degree can equip you with. According to our analysis of job postings and profile data, master’s-level graduates who list health informatics skills on their professional profiles most commonly have the following job titles: Executive positions.