Careers for MS in Health Analytics Graduates | Northwestern - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

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Health data has grown and continues to grow exponentially. Government requirements, remuneration for medical care, and the burden of building and maintaining secure systems have led to an explosion of health data from electronic health records (EHRs). Consumer electronic health data (ehealth) will increase the need for health analytics, as the continuing growth of data from the general population (e.g., iPhone data, personal devices such as FitBit) will further accelerate the gap between the availability of data and the ability to leverage the data to inform all areas of healthcare. For example, health analytics skills will be required to decide which new services should be offered (e.g., determine the market size for a wellness program targeted at people who take 1,000 to 5,000 steps daily), detect changes in health (e.g., changes in self-measured blood pressure or mobility), reduce the cost of care (e.g., predict the need for expensive health interventions), and derive other insights from health data.

In quantitative terms, one estimate projects that medical data is expected to double every 73 days by 2020 ^[1]; another estimate forecasts about 25,000 petabytes (1 PB = 1,024 TB) of health data alone by 2020^[2]. In addition, the distinctive features of health data — largely unstructured, from multiple sources, creating interoperability issues, and presenting security, privacy, and ethical concerns that federal regulations alone can’t address — mean that it is especially challenging to transform into usable knowledge.^[3]

This rapid growth of health data has precipitated a shortage of people with the knowledge and skills to retrieve, interpret, and act on it. A recent market analysis that we commissioned from the Center for Research and Strategy at UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association) reports that “companies are routinely finding it difficult to find qualified personnel in part due to the incredibly high demand”; “there are nearly 28,000 job postings nationwide for healthcare analysts and public health analysts that mention a master’s degree…”^[4] The MSHA will train professions to address this urgent, unmet need.