Comprising 15% of the gross national product (GNP) in 2005, health care is opening the floodgates for entry-level health care practitioners -- as well as mid-career professionals looking to update their skills and stay ahead of the curve.
With the rise of online education in health-care programs, there is no need to quit your day job. In fact, learning the new skills may improve your current work performance. Earning an online degree is an increasingly popular avenue for you to boost your skills, career, earnings and ultimately your job satisfaction.
Health Care Administrators
Description: Keen awareness of regulatory, business, and management affairs are hallmarks of health care administrators. Modern-day medicine is equipped with new tools, drugs, and surgical methods. But it is the administrator who understands behind-the-scenes regulatory affairs. Few medical advances happen without managing intense scrutiny, organizational politics, fraud, and liability suits. That's where health care administrators come in.
Curricula for online degree programs in health care administration & management are carefully designed in response to evolving dynamics 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 online associate's degree or a master's, your skills can launch you into a wide range of managerial posts:
Health Information Manager
Health Services Manager
Mental Health Center Director
Health and Social Service Manager
Patient Accounts Supervisor
Home Health Care Manager
Health and Safety Manager
Allied Health
Description: As the name conveys, Allied Health is about harmony of skills and people. Surgeons, laboratory technicians, orderlies, and nurses co-exist on a primary level to enable and expedite patients' successful recovery. Then there are the less obvious, but equally critical, professionals overseeing a patient's well-being: Personal trainers, opticians, pharmacists, addictions counselors, medical transcriptionists, speech/language pathologists and alternative medicine practitioners.
An associate's degree in medical billing and coding is an increasingly popular route to a large range of Allied Health careers:
Medical Records Specialist
Patient Services Coordinator
Health care Technician
Insurance Verification Representative
Nursing
Description: Part science, part art, nursing is a job that nearly defies concise description. Defined by the International Council of Nurses as one who provides "autonomous and collaborative care of individuals of all ages, families, groups and communities, sick or well and in all settings," a nurse wears many different hats. Rightly dubbed "angels in comfortable shoes," nurses specialize in many different fields including Acute Care, Apheresis, Enterostomal Therapy and Palliative Care.
According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, such angels are lacking. The prominent U.S. shortage of registered nurses (RNs) will increase to 340,000 by the year 2020. Naturally, the demand for nurses is such that it is the second largest occupational field projected for 2014 (with a projected 2.4 million jobs).
About 13% of the RN workforce has a doctoral or master's degree (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
