Healthcare presents a new set of challenges today, and demands a new breed of highly skilled, adaptable professionals.
Jobs are plentiful today – with the impending Baby Boomer exodus and a surging population, healthcare consumed 15% of the Gross National Product (GNP) in 2005. But beyond just scoring a job, you may soon find yourself compelled to update your skills for the new demands of modern healthcare: Breakthrough treatment methods, cost-control imperatives, patient-privacy regulations and nursing shortages.
Without interrupting your busy work schedule, online education is an increasingly popular avenue to bolstering your skills, career, earnings and more importantly – your impact on a globalized health economy.
Two questions remain: Where do you belong, and how do you get in? Depending on your prior career history, you are likely to fall into one of three following Healthcare career categories:
NURSING: Writing a concise description of a nurse's duties, or typical day on the job, is daunting. Whether you specialize in Acute Care, Apheresis, Enterostomal Therapy or Palliative Care, you fill the role of an "angel in comfortable shoes".
Such angels are lacking, however. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the U.S. shortage of registered nurses (RNs) will increase to 340,000 by the year 2020. Despite reports of staffing shortages, a projected 2.4 million nursing jobs make it the second largest occupational field projected for 2014.
About 13% of the RN workforce has a doctoral or Master's degrees (source: American Nursing Association). For the busy nursing professionals, many variations of an online nursing degree offer a convenient path to career advancement:
School nurse certificate
Forensic Nursing Certificate
Legal Nurse Consulting certificate
Nurse Administrator/Educator
Master's in Geriatric Health
ALLIED HEALTH: Your unique technical skills work harmoniously with others to enable and expedite patients’ successful recovery. Surgeons, laboratory technologists and nurses all co-exist on a primary level. Then there are the less-obvious, but critical components of a patient's well-being: Personal trainers, opticians, pharmacist, addictions counselors, medical transcriptionists, speech/language pathologists and alternative medicine practitioners.
An associate’s degree Medical Billing and Coding is an increasingly popular route to a large range of Allied Health careers:
Medical Records Specialist
Patient Services Coordinator
Healthcare Technician
Insurance Verification Representative
HEALTHCARE ADMINISTRATORS: The modern-day physician has a bevy of new tools, drugs, techniques at his or her disposal, while still adhering to a centuries-old Hippocratic Oath. But no physician’s practice is immune to intense scrutiny, organizational politics, health insurance fraud and a spate of medical liability suits. Healthcare administrators are thus indispensable for their keen awareness of business, management and regulatory affairs.
Online degree programs in Healthcare Administration & Management have designed curriculum for the pressing urgencies of 21st Century medicine. They have also aligned a flexible, customized, choice-oriented curriculum with the scheduling demands of a modern-day professional.
Whether you earn an Associate’s degree or a Master’s, your skills can launch you into a wide range of managerial posts:
Health and Social Service Manager
Patient Accounts Supervisor
Home Health Care Manager
Health and Safety Manager
Health Information Manager
Health Services Manager
Mental Health Center Director
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