Graduate / Personal Statement for Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program Application [3]

Hi, please I need editing and comments with a 1.5 paged personal statement which I am using to apply to a public health informatics fellowship program: The personal is statement is a combination answers to these 3 questions:

- What are your career plans after graduating from the program? Why?
- How will the fellowship help you fulfill these plans?
- How will the program complement your previous training and experience?

I am especially struggling with the second 2 questions, and my response ends up being that the fellowship will give me a broader experience and skills. I would really want to make my answers better than this.

Also, the fellowship is geared towards public health graduates with some exposure to informatics with additional training informatics. So I have to write about my previous training but also why I need this fellowship program.

I welcome your critiques and I have included the paper below. Thank you in advance.

What are your career plans after graduating from the Public Health Informatics Fellowship? Why?

My career plan is to effectively integrate health informatics expertise with management skills in order to improve healthcare quality and population health. I want to be in a position where I can design and manage processes that facilitate flow and exchange of health information. I am interested in the use of data for disease surveillance, analytics and research on both local and international health issues. As the world becomes more interconnected and the spread of disease has become easier, data and information from rural areas and developing countries has become more important for addressing transnational health issues. Surveillance of infectious and chronic disease will can add a lot of insight to addressing global health issues. For instance, the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa became more widespread due to the lack of appropriate surveillance systems in place in the rural areas. With the training I will get from {FELLOWSHIP NAME}, I will be a major contributor to tackling these public health issues.

How will the fellowship help you fulfill these plans?

The fellowship program is the best setting to help me accomplish my career goals due to its provision of interdisciplinary training in both informatics and public health. The program will also be a great source of exposure to population health issues on a nationwide scale, and possibly at an international level. Moreover many {ORGANIZATION NAME} projects are focused on population health issues, which will provide me with the skills that are more specific to the area. With this fellowship, I will gain system level exposure to various population health issues that I could not, gain in other settings, with the {ORGANIZATION NAME} being a global leader in public health issues. Existing {ORGANIZATION NAME} programs which I can get to work on as a fellow, will be a great resource to complement my previous experience. I believe that the {FELLOWSHIP NAME} training will greatly complement my previous experience and will help me succeed in my career plan.

How will the fellowship complement your previous training and experience?

The fellowship program will provide me with mastery of and technical expertise of tools used in promoting public health activities from a national and system wide perspective. {FELLOWSHIP NAME} will complement my previous training in health informatics, data analytics and research.

The program will broaden my skills in the use of data for the improvement of quality in public health. During my work at the {Workplace name}, I defined business needs for which I extracted and analyzed data on multiple projects geared towards the improvement of health of the local population. One of the projects I worked on was chronic disease coordination where I used results from my analysis to design ways to implement the project to target improvement of the local population in the collection of zip codes. My target population included diabetes, hypertension and asthma patients. I also used tools like SQL, SAS, Stata and Tableau to analyze and visualize my data. I have also conducted a program evaluation on the effectiveness of a specialty care expansion program in relation to national benchmarks and provided recommendations on where physicians can be hired. {FELLOWSHIP NAME} projects similar to this will consolidate my knowledge and provide an idea of the best practices used in improving the quality and outcomes.

I have also conducted research in measuring the impact of government funded health insurance alternative in the state of {US State}. I will be publishing my results in a journal which will help policy makers make changes in policy that will improve health access for the population. I have also worked on a project where I coordinated with other team members to create the first twin registry in {US State} to promote research on how genetics affects health outcomes. I also led a team in a poster presentation on problems facing the implementation of EHRs in critical access hospitals. Furthermore, I am performing a sentiment analysis on a population in {US City} to determine their attitudes towards smoking, which will be incorporated into the development of a mobile application aimed towards helping that cohort quit. I believe that additional exposure to information technology tools in the fellowship will help broaden my skills.

Overall, the fellowship will increase my ability to create quality solutions and tailor them to a specific need. I improved the operational processes in the Vesicovaginal Fistula surgery department in a Nigerian hospital, where I let the conversion of program tracking information from paper to electronic format, which involves taking multiple factors into consideration, including user-friendliness, controlling for errors and forecasting data fields that will be useful for future analysis. The structure training that {FELLOWSHIP NAME} provide will introduce me to better techniques for designing such tools.