In The Beginning....

This is my first post of my first day as a on campus graduate student of the Health Informatics Interdisciplinary program at the University of Iowa.  I'm 45 years old, and the mother of 2 beautiful and talented daughters.  One is a freshman at Iowa studying Chemistry, and the other is a freshman at Prairie Point 9th Grade Academy studying teenager mahem.  As I see it, this is the first day of the 2nd half of my life (assuming I'm heading on to age 90 or so), and there is no time like the present to get started.

My focus in my studies has several names in the industry depending on who you ask:

• Health Care Business Intelligence (BI)

• Health Care Administration Analytics or Informatics

and specifically, I'd like to focus on sales and marketing (customer relationship management) and financial performance (managed care, medicare/medicaid), so the business side of health care.  


I'm really excited to say, I have a a lot of homework already assigned!  Woo hoo! I will not bore you with all my homework, but I hope to pick a focus area each week and blog about it.   Today, I'll tell you about my Medicare and Medicaid course (as he's the first professor to post the syllabus).
I hope to blog these experiences regularly to inspire those of you to follow your dreams and embark on an adventure such as this on your own.

This week, the learning objective in the Medicare and Medicaid course is to

Characterize the aging population and review patterns of health service use

some of the readings are 'surfing' assignments (my hasn't school changed!) and are focused on statistics involving  'old people'

http://www.agingstats.gov/

http://www.aoa.gov

            http://www.healthyagingprograms.com/index.asp

Next week for this course, we have a field trip to Chicago to visit the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association.

http://www.aha.org/aha/about/index.html

            http://www.ama-assn.org/