Looking to Pivot Your Career This Year?

I have received questions from various clinicians looking to pivot into the tech field. They often feel that they need to start from scratch but individuals who have an understanding of the healthcare field are invaluable in the health informatics field!

Many people who have prior work experience, in general, have transferrable skills that are beneficial if they are looking to work in the health informatics field. If you work as a nurse or pharmacy technician consider looking for opportunities to be trained on specific technical systems within your job, such as the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. You might find an opportunity to become a super-user, where you are provided with advanced training and might even train other clinical staff. This skillset would be great to add to your resume if you are looking to apply for roles within the health informatics field, such as an EHR Analyst or an Application Analyst.

You can listen to my interview with Jennifer Lewis MSN-NI, BSN, RN who works as a Senior Nurse Manager in Nursing Informatics. Jennifer started out as a nurse and quickly established herself as the “go-to” technical person. She made sure to highlight the positive changes she had made on the floor, during her informatics interview.

Listen to the interview here

If you’re looking to upskill over the summer and improve your skills in Power BI and SQL, to more easily pivot into a career in health informatics, check out my course where I walk you through a real-life clinical problem and the creation of a Hospital KPI Dashboard portfolio project, which you can showcase to hiring managers.

I often receive questions from clinicians about whether a degree in health informatics will be beneficial to help pivot their careers. It might, but given the price of degrees these days and the fact that you might have other financial goals if you are mid-career, I personally would explore networking opportunities before signing up for a pricy degree which may or might not improve my chances of getting a job in this field.

If you currently work in a healthcare organization I would reach out to the business intelligence or clinical decision support department to see if there are any opportunities to job shadow a health informatics role so I can get a sense of any technical skill gaps I might be missing. In addition, I would try to grow my network by attending any HIMSS conferences or events near me or considering volunteering at health informatics organizations.

Upcoming Events

I am speaking as part of the amazing speaker series from MelaninScience, please share with your network as I will be providing some more tips on how to pivot your career into a healthcare data analyst role!

Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference is coming up on August 16-17th

The Healthcare Data and Analytics Association Conference is coming up on September 16-19th

Best,

Alana