health informatics as a career path

Question

• What IT skills are necessary to work in health informatics?
• Does one need experience in a healthcare field like nursing or medical insurance?
• Is the field more populated by healthcare professionals who have added IT skills or by IT pros who have healthcare experience?
• What are the common job roles?
• What technologies should one focus on?

Answer 1

1. The same kinds of IT skills you'll find everywhere else, plus experience with disaster recovery/redundancy in systems and mission critical application development, as well as database design and software architecture.

2. Healthcare knowledge is definitely required, but I don't think everyone in healthcare IT is a domain expert.

3. That's subjective (and I've not seen any studies), but all of the informatics folks I know are IT professionals and didn't work in healthcare specifically, with a few exceptions.

4. Developer, database administrator, systems architect, program manager, and so on. Same as "regular IT."

5. Security, operating systems, mobile computing, HCI, object-oriented development, trusted computing, and so on.

Take a look at the degree program for a bachelor's in informatics. There are two courses on anatomy & physiology. That should tell you something.

Answer 2

Seeing how my father struggled having IT professionals understand how a hospital's biology lab works, and seeing how bio-informatics curriculums flourish nowadays, I'd say you better have quite some comfort manipulating scientific concepts. You don't need to be a neurosurgeon, but having a basic knowledge of medicine, biology and chemistry might be invaluable in some fields.

You could still be a pure-IT technician, then you might need to be highly skilled in what mission-critical IT needs, (healthcare being no exeption): high availability, data security, computer security, etc...

Answer 3

Those are some good answers. Here is a link to a Q&A with Dr. Larry Pawola, Program Director of the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago's Health Informatics program. I had similar questions and I found this to be very helpful. I eventually enrolled in the UIC Master's program.

It is a link from HealthcareITjobs.com: http://files.e2ma.net/16902/assets/docs/faqs_-_u_of_i-chicago_online_masters.pdf

Answer 4

I think you have to be careful to differentiate between Health Informatics and Healthcare Software Development. Health Informatics is a whole discipline focused on the use of information to improve healthcare this includes IT but also has a large focus on health care process refinement to make better use of the information.

I'm currently studying for an MSc in Health Informatics and one of the biggest focuses is on the use of statistical analysis rather than specific IT.

To directly answer your questions:

The skills needed to do well in Healthcare are very much dependent on the specific type of software you are developing. From experience I've found that a high proportion of projects involve some elements of integration with legacy systems with this in mind a wide understanding of varying platforms, DBMS, languages and messaging standards is very useful. Beyond this as another poster mentions experience of developing mission critical software which I agree can be very useful, some healthcare systems will be relied on by doctors and nurses and any downtime, especially in an A&E environment could potentially cost patient lives. Another key thing to remember is many Healthcare Professionals are not computer literate, intuitive UI designers are often sought after especially when developing systems for users that are under pressure and need patient information rapidly.

I do think that as with any area of software development that domain specific knowledge is a massive advantage. I manage a software development team for a company that almost exclusively works for the NHS, when I recruit new programmers I do value those with Healthcare experience over those without. Healthcare IT offers a number of unique challenges that take time and experience to wrap your head around.

In my experience of British healthcare computing, software is in the main developed by people from IT backgrounds however a large proportion of project managers and information officers on the NHS side come from healthcare backgrounds.

The job roles are much the same as any other software development industry although for certain areas, specifically those that deal with interpreting clinical data you may find a stronger emphasis on testing than in other areas of IT.

As mentioned previously software sytems in Healthcare come in a variety of technologies. In the last couple of years .Net has been predominant in new projects but I do know of a number of high profile systems that are written in classic ASP, Delphi and even some leveraging MUMPs.

Answer 5

A solid class in biostatistics will be very helpful, as will some exposure to epidemiology and public health. One of the professional tasks of health informatics is to bring together clinical, IT, and statistical knowledge, so that medical people, programmers, and statisticians can work together. At a minimum, you'll need to be able to converse in the jargon of those three professions.

Check out the professional association called HIMMS (http://www.himss.org/). They publish a list of relevant academic programs here: http://www.himss.org/content/files/EducatorsSIGdirectory.pdf

A colleague (an RN) has been through the program at Northwestern University and speaks well of it.