New Mississippi Degrees for a New Economy

JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi colleges and universities will offer six new degrees next year – most of them in the technology and health fields – degrees such as a Master of Health Informatics and Information Management at University of Mississippi Medical Center. It’s a long name that will qualify graduates for an even longer list of jobs.

“It’s going to just blow [career possibilites] wide open,” said Kristy Nugent. “The Age of Technology has already made so many changes and the US has been behind has been in a lot of that and now we are catching up.

Nugent will be one of the first students to enroll officially as a master’s student of health informatics – basically the study of medical record keeping.  Think of the old shelves crammed with alphabetized, color-coded records in any doctor’s office.  Anne Peden, the Program Director of Health Informatics and Information Management at UMMC, says that’s changing.

“That picture doesn’t apply at the present time at a number of hospitals,” said Peden. “The paper records are going away. So if you visit a medical record department, you see people in cubicals with computers, that sort of thing.”

Peden says medical data applications of the future will be tooled for quicker retrieval and will help doctors and nurses solve problems and make decisions.  Systems won’t be able to diagnose but they can catch harmful medication combinationsbefore they’re prescribed and aggregate data for research.

Other new degrees will include a Doctorate of Nursing Practice at Delta State University andMississippi University for Women.  And Jackson State University and the University of Southern Mississippi will also be adding new degrees to existing undergraduate engineering programs.

Dr. Hank Bounds, Commissioner of Higher Learning, says these new education opportunities mean a stronger Mississippi economy tomorrow.

“Any student that graduates with any degree in science is immediately employable,” said Bounds. “Any student that graduates with any type of medical degree is automatically employable.”

Classes for these new degrees are scheduled to begin as early as next semester.

About Annie Gilbertson

Annie Gilbertson makes the move to Mississippi Public Broadcasting from Chicago. While in the Windy City, Annie interned at Chicago Public Radio (no, she never met Ira Glass) where she focused on integrating user-generated content into the broadcast as well as producing stories with the non-traditional public radio listener in mind. With CPR, she taught many radio making workshops and spent last summer as a radio instructor for a large community center. Annie also led production of Northwestern University's official podcast and worked part-time at scene shop in the city. She's excited to return to the South having "cut her reporting teeth" in Auburn, AL.

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