Jascraft - what made you decide to get the LPN in the first place? What type of computer background do you have? Do you have any programming experience. People in the healthcare informatics area come from two directions. They are either clinicians with a speciality in informatics or they are technical people who happen to be clinicians. Almost all of the people in nursing informatics are nurses with a speciality (experience and/or education) in nursing informatics. Very few have technical degrees, but many of they have BSN (RN) or higher. This is understandable because they come into this field as clinicians that have assimulated informatics knowledge. The main focus is they are clinicians. Kathleen is right in saying that you need nursing experience to take on their roles. Informatic nurses work for hospitals to implement vendor systems in their organization, working, some, as analysts. Those working for vendors are often in marketing, learning products, or support. Check out the web page from
www.amia.org in the nursing informatics group for job descriptions and informatics links. But if you are more interested in the technical, then you are coming from the other direction and you could get a technical job working in the hospital IT department or for a vendor. It would depend on your technical experience. Check out
www.himss.org and their job bank for the type of positions where the technical takes on a greater focus. There is a lot of information out there, and definitely you can combine the two. Good Luck
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