"Congratulations to our partner Healthsource that has been launched into the Public Health Sphere. It's been a pleasure to work with Christian and his team and we hope the site will be beneficial to all public health professionals! Kudos to the team!"
http://publichealth.drexel.edu/Media/Latest-News/News-Detail/5036/newsid--1268/
website:Healthsource.us.com

For Christian Bijoux, MPH ’10, frustration became the engine for a business idea. As a Drexel University School of Public Health MPH student in 2008, he was becoming increasingly annoyed at the lack of one central website for public health research, job opportunities and internships. His solution? Creating Healthsource.us.com.

The process of creating the website was not overnight. From the time Bijoux (pictured, right) began turning the idea around in his head, to his discussions with fellow students and colleagues, to partnering with iMustardSoft, LLC, a New York based software development firm to create the website to the recent beta launch of Healthsource.us.com—the process took a total of about four years.

At the time, Bijoux was taking Professor Raymond Lum’s course on strategy and innovation and he cited the course as a turning point. “It wasn’t until Professor Lum’s course—Strategy, Innovation and Change Management in Public Health—that the idea started to gel. It wasn’t about coming up with a completely new idea. It was taking an idea and making it better. That’s when I realized that public health really wasn’t taking advantage of social media.”

Professor Lum said he was happy to hear that the course sparked Bijoux’s interest. “Christian was an enthusiastic and energetic student with an entrepreneurial spirit. One of our goals as professors is to create self-directed learners and alums such as Christian demonstrate that our program has certainly achieved this.”

He continued, “I am pleased that he was able to find his public health passion towards dissemination of public health practice utilizing the internet and social media. Christian, like many others who attend Drexel's MPH program, possesses a multitude of skills beyond his academic ability. Our task as educators is to inspire them to utilize all their skills in creative and innovative ways to address the many public health challenges. We look forward to his accomplishment in shaping public health solutions.”

He also mentioned Professor Dennis Gallagher as instrumental in changing the way he thought. “Professor Gallagher was my advisor and he also introduced me to the article ‘Wicked Problems and Social Complexity,’ allowed me to view problems in such a different way. My time at the DUSPH really exposed me to these different ways of thinking and I’m thankful to both Professor Lum and Professor Gallagher for really challenging me and exposing me to readings that triggered my idea.”

Bijoux said the launch for the site is planned for February 2013. “We are going to launch in mid-February next year. We’re working with some organizations and close friends and colleagues on webinars that will be exclusive for the website. We’re also working on our career center, where users will be able to create their own profile and upload resumes for professional development,” he said.

Ultimately, Bijoux hopes the site will be engaging and useful for public health professionals and academics. “I see it as a place for public health professionals and scholars to go to enhance their career at any stage. A lot of publications and internships that could help are hard to find—I think if I can eliminate the difficulty of searching for this information and have it one place, it can help,” he explained. “The organized field of public health is still relatively young compared to say, medicine. It’s still getting there in that it’s a very broad field. I want to make sure that by using healthsource.us.com, people can see the full benefits of a career in public health.”