Application Systems Analyst

Does anyone work in this role? As someone who hopes to get into nursing informatics, is this something for me? I was also concerned that if it wasn't specifically nursing- does it make it difficult to renew your RN?? Also, any salary info?

Thank you !

Yes, i work in that role.

To quickly shed some light, applications systems analyst could be the same as clinical analyst, informatics analyst, application consultant, etc. It really depends on how an employer decides to label its employees.

For example, in one hospital I worked at, they gave the title clinical analyst to those people who had a clinical background---RN's, RT's, even Physical Therapists/Occupational Therapies, etc,.---and worked with a clinical application. Everyone else who had no clinical background working as an analyst was called application analyst.

Essentially though, we all did the same thing, although we worked in different applications. Obviously, if you worked with an outpatient application, you might have a bit of a different role than if you worked let's say with a surgical application. But implementing a project always goes through the same cycles, just that you might be interacting with different players in your implementation.

But again, the main thing to know is that generally, an informatics analyst might do the same thing as an application analyst, and vice versa. For more details on the difference between the roles you can read here.

Is it for you? Well, I'm no psychic, so can't help you there. Otherwise, i would definitely be in a completely different line of work!

To renew your license you just do what you did years before. Obviously, license renewals vary by state, but as long as you do your CEU's, then renewing the license is not a problem. If anything for me the biggest problem is remembering to renew my license, and I've had to pay late fees for renewing it months after it expired. That never happened to me when I was working as a floor nurse.

As far as salary, again, it depends on many factors like location, application you're working with, experience, employer, etc. But you could be working in rural hospital making 50k or you could be working in a big city making a lot more.

A survey came out earlier this year that said that the average salary was 102k in informatics. What people don't really read in the survey is that only 1000 people or so participated in it, and it included mainly people with experience and master's degrees.

Imagine doing a survey trying to figure out the average salary of nurses and you only go and interview nurses with 5 years of experience, who work in States like California, New York, and Texas. Is that going to give you an accurate average salary for somebody working in Mississippi? Most definitely not!

And that's why on my blog i will get an email every so often of somebody saying, I got a salary offer of 70k. Why is it so low when I read that the average is 100k?

Ikarus7401 thank you for your insightful comments. I moved from Emergency Nursing into Informatics and because of my clinical and I.T. background I'm labeled a Clinical Analyst. Some of my peers have clinical but no I.T. background and they are labeled R.N. analysts.

I've continued to do shifts in my ED as a way to keep in touch with my end users and to work with the system they way they have to work with it. One of the effects is to remind me that I need to keep all of my certifications current as well as my license.

A large portion of what I do is development of my EHR and then roll out and training/support, so the other effect of working the unit and being seen in scrubs by the general population is that I've gained a lot of trust from my RN co-workers through out the institution. I also get to see first hand what is working vs what isn't working in regards to patient care and the role of EHR.

I have seen many variation of titles in healthcare informatics, including all kinds of variation of the term "analyst". I have also seen two people with the same title responsible for very different tasks in different organizations. The only way to know what this position involves is to evaluate the position tasks/roles. Much of it also depends on who is providing the position. The role of analyst in a healthcare agency like a hospital is very different than the role of analyst at a vendor. Another clue is whether the position requires, prefers, or doesn't even mention that you need to be a clinician. The more clinical, the more involved in the specific clinical aspects of the organization. The job posting may provide some information on roles and responsibilities. If not found in the posting, then then next best place is find out during the phone interview or talk to the recruiter if there is one.