The public health industry has many options for lucrative careers. However, employers prefer candidates who have relevant experience and a higher education degree in public health.
Career options and salaries vary depending on several factors. Some factors include the location, cost of living and the company you’ll choose to work for eventually. To make it easier for you, we’ve listed the most lucrative careers for those interested in pursuing a career in public health.
Before Choosing a Career
Nowadays, to get any job, you are required to have, at the very least, a bachelor’s degree. Public health is no exception. The minimum requirement for having a successful career in public health is a bachelor’s in public health or BPH.
You can choose to major in health administration, nursing, or informatics. Although it is not required to work in the field, most employees have a master’s in public health or MPH to qualify for higher positions in public health.
Most industry professionals in the public and private sectors recommend getting an MPH, which offers specializations in a variety of fields like epidemiology, global health, community health, and environmental health, among others.
One of the best universities that offer an MPH program is Lamar University. They provide an online MPH program, which is convenient for people who are too busy to attend universities. The program is 24 months long, with a total cost of $13,629. The last and final degree in public health is Doctor of Public Health or DPH, ideal for those who want to become college professors or assume a research position.
If you’ve earned a Master’s degree in public health, deciding your role can be confusing. Following are high-paying jobs in public health you should apply for.
Guest post by Gillian Christie, health innovation analyst, Vitality.
Gillian Christie
An era of self-quantification of health behaviors using technology is emerging outside of the doctor’s office. Consumer-facing health technologies empower individuals to monitor their health in real-time, employers to understand the health of their workforce, and researchers to uncover health trends across geographies. Eventually, the data from these technologies will re-enter the hospital setting by linking to our electronic medical records.
Deluges of data are rapidly being generated by these technologies. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, indicates that data is the “next natural resource.” But how are these data protected and secured?
In the United States, laws have historically protected consumers from the misuse or abuse of their medical information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) have protected medical data from inappropriate uses. Data generated by consumer-facing health technologies, however, are not covered by these Acts. Companies can use the data for their own purposes. This means that companies must be ever more vigilant in ensuring the trust of their consumers through their data practices.
How can we collaborate across sectors to maintain and enhance trust? As a start, Vitality, Microsoft and the Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego, published an open-access, peer-reviewed commentary that outlined ethical, legal and social concerns associated with emerging health technologies. The call to action was for guidelines to be developed through a consultative process on the responsible innovation of these technologies and the appropriate stewardship of data from the devices. Between July and October 2015, we hosted a global public consultation to identify best practices. On Mar. 2, 2016, at HIMSS, we released the finalized guidelines for personalized health technology. They include five recommendations:
