Master’s in Public Health Grooms Leaders
For Greater Health
Brian McHorney plans to explore health care policy development. UNH’s M.P.H. program is the only public university program in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont that makes the program available to health care professionals in the area.
Brian McHorney, a master’s degree student in public health at the Center for Graduate and Professional Studies and UNH Manchester, has been involved in some form of health care since graduating from high school. He worked as a medical transcriber and computer network administrator. Listening as doctors talked about the symptoms of their patients along with their diagnoses, McHorney began to ask what he could do to help.
Now he wants to use his computer skills to assist the health care providers in creating policies using feedback from data.
An employee at Integrated Healthcare Information Services (IHCIS), McHorney uses health insurance provider data in conjunction with a large health experience database of individuals nationwide to predict the health risks of a carrier’s current membership. Data is returned to the health insurance providers, who can then intervene with high-risk patients.
Earning his M.P.H. degree will open doors in McHorney’s career at IHCIS. He also plans to explore health care policy development regarding HIV/AIDS awareness and same sex adoption.
Notes McHorney, “By turning data into information that health care decisions can be based on, it greatly improves the quality of health care that can be provided to the public.”