The ever-growing pressure on doctors and hospitals to deliver better, safer care as cost-efficiently as possible — and to emphasize prevention in an effort to keep people well — has greatly increased the demand for workers with all sorts of highly specialized skills.
A whole array of graduate programs are being introduced that prepare students to tackle health care’s biggest challenges. Topics include digital health care delivery; population health, the new practice model of being compensated for keeping a patient population as healthy as possible; health care delivery science; and the effect of climate change on disease.
Some of these programs were created in response to the Affordable Care Act, whose provisions may disappear or change under President Donald Trump. But experts at the universities offering them believe the trends set in motion by advances in technology and a dire need to improve care and bring costs down will continue regardless of the political environment.
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“The fundamental questions in health policy have been the same for many years now,” says Rainu Kaushal, chair of the department of health care policy and research at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “The answers are agnostic to who is in the White House or controlling Congress.”
Weill Cornell and Cornell’s school of management will launch an executive MBA-M.S. program in health care leadership this fall that will prepare working professionals to run, say, hospitals or health systems or insurance companies.
Below the top executive rank, people with specialized health degrees are finding a multitude of opportunities as managers, ranging from running physician groups to developing cost-cutting plans in hospitals and implementing electronic health records.
Such positions are expected to jump by 17 percent from 2014 to 2024, much faster than the average overall job growth of 7 percent, according to government projections. Median pay for these health managers is $94,500.
For Jena Simon, advanced training in health care delivery science provided an immediate career boost. Simon, who graduated a year ago from the two-year-old master’s program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, completed the 21-month online program while working as a nurse practitioner in the hospital’s Comprehensive Program for Sickle Cell Disease, which offers patients a mix of social and medical services as well as the opportunity to participate in clinical trials.
She wanted the know-how to expand the program to the system’s other hospitals, and the classes gave her the skills to build a business plan and apply for a $5 million grant. She won the grant and was named co-director of the new project. “That wouldn’t have been possible without this degree,” Simon says.
[Learn about pursuing leadership skills for success in a health care career.]
Students who are accepted into Mount Sinai’s program are already working in a health profession; they take all their classes online and come together for two weeks for in-person seminars. The program is largely focused on health management and strategic planning, and it can change quickly to respond to new legislation.
During a class in health care finance last fall, several students requested training in the just-passed Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, which is widely expected to be preserved by the Trump administration. So the school added a module on the legislation to one of its online classes, bringing in a guest lecturer to teach it.
“We can immediately add content and reorient courses,” says Brian Nickerson, a professor in the department of population health science and policy.
Some institutions are building entire graduate degrees around emerging health challenges. Yale University, the University of California– Berkeley and the University of Washington are among those that allow grad students in public health to specialize in climate change, for example, completing classes, projects and internships centered around studying the impact of extreme weather, drought, environmental contaminants and other variables on health.
In summer 2016, one Yale student interned with local health department officials , studying the impact of bacterial contamination on beaches, for example.
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Robert Dubrow, faculty director of the Climate Change and Health Initiative at Yale, says he expects demand for such expertise to grow even if the new administration doesn’t prioritize climate concerns.
“More and more nongovernment organizations are doing work related to climate change and health,” as are state governments, Dubrow notes. “California has one of the most advanced climate-change programs in the country looking at the health effects of heat waves and droughts,” he says.
Drexel University has seen such demand from students to drill down that it has redesigned its Master of Public Health program to encourage specialization. Starting this fall, students will pick majors and minors that prepare them to work on particular issues or with defined populations.
For example, a student could major in community health and prevention and minor in infectious disease prevention and control, says Yvonne Michael, associate dean for academic and faculty affairs at Drexel’s Dorsife School of Public Health. Other minors in development include substance use and misuse; Latino and immigrant health; and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender health.
Drexel offers both full-time and part-time degrees and joint M.D.-M.P.H. and J.D.-M .P .H . programs. Students are expected to complete at least 120 hours of work in the field related to their specialties.
Daniel Kinder, 23, says his stint with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has been the most rewarding part of his master’s program in community health and prevention, which he’ll complete this spring. For his first-year project, Kinder helped create a strategy to measure the impact of the hospital’s new Community Health and Literacy Center in South Philadelphia. In his second year, he helped gather input on the program and develop strategies for adding new services.
“I get to attend community meetings and meet with stakeholders,” Kinder says. It’s been a great way to gain insights into the fast-evolving world he will enter.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Graduate Schools 2018” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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Graduate Schools Offer New Paths Into Health Care originally appeared on usnews.com
