Health Professional Uses MHA Program as a Launching Pad for New Role

For the first 10 years of her healthcare career, Danielle Fowler did a little bit of everything. She worked in billing, at the front desk of a doctor’s office, and then moved into a hospital setting. There, she worked as a unit secretary, in admissions and in registration, too.

“I’ve always been involved in the medical field in one way or another,” she said. Her desire to work in healthcare was there even as a little girl – seeing people in need and wondering how she could help.

In 2007, she decided to pivot into a new healthcare field and became a nurse in 2009, eventually earning her bachelor’s degree in nursing. She worked as a nurse for more than a dozen years and then had a desire to use her skills in a different way.

“After a while, I had been searching to further my career, but I didn’t really have a good idea of what I wanted to do,” Fowler recalls. After looking at different master’s programs, she started thinking more and more about a master’s in health administration.

“After talking with Maureen (Program Director Dr. Maureen Walsh Koricke), I decided the Queens MHA was the perfect fit for me. It touched on every little bit of experience I had over the last 20 years.”

The Queens MHA program offers students an in-depth education in the management and operations of healthcare organizations, touching on a wide variety of topics including financial management, quality improvement, and healthcare law.

“Working as a nurse, you’re really looking at fine details,” Fowler said. “But I also wanted to look at the grander view. I wanted to look at the big picture and see how I could make improvements on a larger scale.”

During her second year in the MHA program, Fowler accepted a job working in informatics at Novant Health’s Presbyterian Medical Center. Her MHA studies were immediately relevant to her daily work – from data collection to process improvement.

After graduating in 2024, Fowler was quickly promoted after only a year as a nurse informaticist. Now, she works in a senior analyst role overseeing the entire service line for emergency and trauma services. She primarily works with the hospital’s electronic medical records system, looking at workflows and suggested process improvements. She also has to analyze data, prioritize it, and use it to find solutions.

“Pretty early on, I was able to put together a process improvement project. And all of the data collection, the process improvement process, I learned from Queens. For me, it was nice to put what I learned into practice,” she said. “I got promoted quickly, and I think it’s because of what I learned at Queens.”

Fowler also credits the small class sizes and knowledgeable instructors – who bring decades of industry experience – for making a positive impact on her career.

“Other programs seemed like they were just about checking the boxes. With this program, the work was manageable, and the learning was meaningful. I felt like it was much more about making sure that we understood what we were learning,” she said.

Visit the MHA program webpage to learn more.