Is there a shortage or glut of nurses in informatics?

Greetings S-Rank,

I dont think there is any one particular practice area that will give you more experience than another. Through clinical experience you obtain the fundamentals of how nursing is practiced and how healthcare works. Through clinical practice you learn how to work as a team playing, how to work independently; you learn problem solving, critical thinking, thinking outside the box, leadership skills, change management, how to communicate, prioritization and much more. Nursing practice teaches you these skills and more.......... on a level far above and beyond studying theory and (in my humble opinion) because of the sometimes life and death nature of our work environment at a more complex level than a few other professions. Lets face it, as a nurse if you f___ up it could very well mean the end of someone's life ..............right? A nurse who has gone beyond the novice level of clinical practice (no matter his/her clinical specialty area) is the foundation of a potentially excellent informaticist.

Question...

I am workign on my RN right now.

I don't have 'formal' IT experience and no IT degree but I can spit out optimized SQL queries in my sleep, program in several languages and traverse secured networks with my eyes closed.

Not to mention all the mundane stuff.

Is the formal experience as necessary or required as the actual skill?

Never really was interested in informatics before (due mainly to ignorance of the field) but it is looking more and more interesting.

I am really wondering if I should work on some kind of Comp. Sci or Eng. degree simultaneously with my RN so that I will have a second degree by the time I have a few years experience as an RN.

Greetings Stanley-RN2B,

Yes the formal experience of having practiced as a clinician is usually a position requirement and one that increases your credibility and your ability to practice as an informaticist ............but it does all depend on the specific position/role.
I definately know that the skill of query writing is a valuable one in several roles within this specialty.
Programming is done by programmers for vendors and not usually in IT departments in hospitals, physciains offices or other healthcare organizations. So if you want to write code for a vendor then thats the way to go.
I think in addition to clinical credentials an IT degree would increase your marketability.
Getting an aditional CS, IT, Eng degree should be connected to exactly what it is you want to do and in which direction you want to take your career. Good Luck!

Stan, I TODAY faxed my application for the www.wxcelsior.edu RN-MSN in informatics.

Really, the degree for you to get is the BSN so that you can get advanced practice certs with less of a problem, or even become a practitioner should you so desire. In my not so humble opinion, of course.

I don't think a clinical area matters, unless you know of a specific job that requires you to be skilled in a certain area, and your goal is to get that specific job.

As for myself, I worked all areas of medical surgical units, and the job I got was implementing an operating room application; I had zero experience in that area, except for maybe understanding some of the post op flow, but ironically enough I got turned down for all the jobs that involved applications in the regular floors that I was experienced on.

Of course, there were times when i was on a job search and it would say something like, labor and delivery experience preferred, or emergency department clinical experience required, etc, but not all jobs required specific clinical experience. What you will see the most though is, clinical experience preferred or clinical experience or hospital workflow understanding a plus....

Hence, I would choose to work in a clinical area that you're interested in, and not worry too much about selecting the best clinical experience for informatics.

As Perseus said, clinical experience, period.

Mine was mostly LTC, simply because, as an LPN, that's what was most easily available.



As an LPN, if you aren't in a rural area you might have to get in sideways - offer to become a super-user, learn the system inside-out and see if you can get in that way.

Good luck.

Right now in my facility we only have an IT director. Not a nurse.

However, he is rarely there and I have become the 'unofficial' superuser.

I don't technically have super user access but that's not really a problem. I pretty much handle every issue that comes up that isn't so big that I refuse to touch it (don't want to get in trouble ).

So the IT experience is not really necessary compared to the clinical experience then?

I was wanting to go ICU or Trauma immediately after school. I guess that can still be a go.

The BSN is most likely NOT going to happen. I am already in an ADN program. I would be willing to do an RN-MSN program though. That would give me plenty of years to get out of nurse newbieness. I'll have to look into it. Are there ADN - BSN programs??? I'd rather not take an initial 4 year program because I really want (and need) to hit the floor sooner than later.

ETA: Oh... I'm silly. There's one right there on the Excelsior site.

Stan, my boss would have been thrilled to take a nurse from the floor who had an interest and even a smidgeon of knowledge aout systems and train.

If you could get a reference from your IT director that would be more than enough for an entry level spot in a lot of places, particularly smaller facilities without a lot of budget but a need to comply with various regulations in the works. Seriously.

You're wicked smart. That combined with a license is the most important start. Excelsior is really great about letting you CLEP, distance, whatever to fulfill gen eds. They are making me take ONE non-core class for this.

There are some sciences I would love to take, but I will after my degree is conferred instead of do pre-reqs to get into a different program. I have over 200 undergrad credits. I'm done. I want and need a bachelor's, and one of the nice things about the Excelsior program is that I will substitute grad level courses for the undergrad at the undergrad tuition, AND I can opt out of the MSN and complete the BSN when those requirements are complete with one additional course, I believe.

And Stan, there are many reputable RN-BSN programs on-line, many through your local state (or district) university.

I would venture to answer your question with, yea IT experience is not really necessary, but it doesn't hurt to have it, and it really depends on the specific job you're going for; if you want to do programming for an application used clinically, then of course, you will be required to have IT experience more so than clinical experience. But there are other jobs out there that don't require much IT experience.
However, in the last year or so, I have seen a greater number of candidates that have better credentials than I saw in 2005, and 2006 and by that I mean that they have an RN degree along with some other IT experience; with that said, becoming a superuser gives you invaluable credentials towards getting a job in the informatics field.

Now, as a consultant, I have gone to many hospitals and I've met the IT/informatics staff, and many times the nurses that volunteered to be superusers got chosen to be put in the IT team; some hated it and quit that role, and others simply loved it and stayed in the team. As they had no IT experience, many had to take some intro database course, or programming course to be able to do their jobs better. Others didn't have much to do with programming so they learned on the fly....

Just 3 months ago we had a nursing assistant who is always doing more than what she has time for, and as nobody wanted to volunteer to simply enter data in the system, she volunteered to do it; 2 months later and now she has been asked to join the IT team doing simple build and troubleshooting tasks. Little does she know that she has a bright future ahead now and all her IT experience prior to the IT job, was excel and photoshop.