Are you a new informatics nurse?

Specialties Informatics

Published

Calling All Newbies!

As a newly hired informatics nurse, I've been perusing the website and reading similar stories about graduate programs, job searching, learning the role, etc. I'd like to start a network of new informatics nurses (either in school, or in the field for less than a year or two). It seems like we are all going through nearly the same process, just at slightly different points in time.

If you are interested, please reply here. I cannot send anyone a private message yet (I have to create 15 Quality Topics before I have the ability to do that), but I'm sure we can figure out a way to connect.

Thanks!!

what does a nurse informaticist do? and if the requires a MSN, why isnt this in the APRN thread section?

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I am an LPN with 8 years of experience in hospital, hospice, LTC management and administration. I started a position in IT for Epic Help Desk calls. I am assisting during training courses while not doing help desk. We are working on a large hospital system go live that happens in 3 weeks. I started 3 weeks ago and still get calls for this position through other consulting firms. I love it so far and plan to finish my RN within the next 2 years.

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I also should add my resume was very "IT' friendly and i emphasized my ability to work on a computer ( esp during the interview, anything you do on a computer helps ). I also highlighted all the experience I had during my management days when we implemented electronic records systems.

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I'm getting my masters in Nursing Informatics and will love to be part of this.

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I will love to be a part of this network. I have been a nurse for 15 years. I graduated with my MSN in Informatics last April, looking to take my certification exam by middle this year. I have just started to look for a job in the field but haven't landed one as of yet.

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Hey, I'm currently working on my first year in Med-Surg. I am very interested and currently enrolling in a BSN-MSN program with an emphasis in Informatics. I would love to be part of the network.

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i'm new! i just accepted a job around the nursing informatics field

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Specializes in Medical-Surgical, Informatics.

i love nursing informatics all day every day 3 years running :)

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I have been an RN for 23 years, graduated in December with my MS in Healthcare Informatics. I am very sorry to be saddled now with tens of thousands in loans for this degree. Although I love the field and built my hospitals EMR from the beginning, taught the Superusers, am now a Superuser, I remain in my job of RN. They have stuck so many people with no degrees in analyst positions, they don't know what they are going to do with all the nurses they stuck in those positions when we go live in a few weeks. I am facing the same issue as many of you of job postings wanting 3 to 5 years experience which I don't have. I own a home in a small area where the houses for sale are not moving at all, so relocating isn't possible right now.

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Specializes in informatics for 10 years.
I have been an RN for 23 years, graduated in December with my MS in Healthcare Informatics. I am very sorry to be saddled now with tens of thousands in loans for this degree. Although I love the field and built my hospitals EMR from the beginning, taught the Superusers, am now a Superuser, I remain in my job of RN.

If you built your hospital's EMR, why didn't you apply for jobs using that experience? What led you to go get a master's degree?

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I just graduated with an ASN, will be taking the NCLEX next month and plan on pursuing my BSN this fall.

I actually come from IT (30 years experience) and attended nursing school with the intent of going into informatics. I have "HIT Support Specialist Certification" (a 6 month program).

I'm curious as to whether I can get into the field now with my experience and as a new RN or if I need to get my BSN first and/or go into a clinical setting first to get that experience. "

Also, if I don't get my clinical experience right after graduation, will it be impossible to go into bedside at a later time if I decide I want to do that?

Thanks!

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The followings are some of my observations from INTENSE (wowzer! first paragrah in and we've already brought in the CAPITAL LETTERS) involvement with different facets of nursing informatics (clinical strategies, GoLive, superuser training, project management). Note they are not in any particular order, and as this post progresses, both your and my attention span diminishes. Mine more than yours.

1. Additional degrees/ certs are not of importance if you are just starting at the bottom of the EHR/NI ladder. As long as you know the Workflow (a big word that gets tossed frequently) and contribute to the Project/ Team as a resource of how the workflow of a nuit/ department can be translated into the digital enviornment of Cerner/ Epic/ AllScripts, do not even bother with a BSN or MSN.

2. Through my past experience there are bad apples. Your advanced degree in nursing informatics might get you into the door but quickly you are tried and tested. There are very little room for excuses like "the computer crashed before I get to save it," or "I pasted a large area of cells and lost all my previous work."

The diploma mill only teaches/ requires you how to save a word document, or a powerpoint at best. Do you know right clicking the mouse can bring you more options/ actions? Can you work comfortably with excel under time pressure? I'm talking about 200+ lines with different shades, borders, colors, comment-inserts or printing/ fitting information on one page, mapping/ finding printers, work the projectors, VISIO, that some of you might find rudimentary, but hey, some of those bad apples I spoke earlier.. let's just politely say we all bring different talents to the team.

3. The reward threshhold is completely different. It's very rewarding to be a floor nurse, I feel good and a sense of accomplishment by the end of my 8 or 12 hour shift. But with a GoLive project? It's anywhere from 8 to 12 months. It demands you a lot of after hours to construct, refine your workflow, checking your email, being in the meetings.

At times you can't move forward with your responsibility until someone else finishes his/ her part first. It's a lot less independent, a lot more hours. A nursing informaticist lives just like my Google/Yahoo/ IBM engineer buddies-- you bring your work home and you are tied to emails and con calls.

4. The consultants make twice as much as we do, but they know how to build. How do you start at that path as a builder or a project manager? By applying to the companies that sell EHR products (Cerner, Epic, etc). After a few years you can link up with a IT staffing company and start consulting. But they work from project to project so job security is obviously an issue and many of nurses do not have a tolerance for that.

Most of the consultants travel weekly to their job, then return to their home town for the weekends. They sit in front of the screen for 6, 7 hours. It's not a healthy lifestyle but you do get acclimated to it. You just have to figuer out if this is the best option for your current stage of life.

5. Consultants, although the pay's great, can get fired on the job. One really has to know his/ her stuff well, articulate well, and mingle well with all the coworkers (aka there are politics). Watch Don Cheadle's "House of Lies" if you feel you are completely oblivious about corprorate culture.

6. You won't find this field rewarding if you. are. kind. of. lazy. Let's face it, we all got a lil of that in us. We've all seen some floor nurses who take longer breaks, that's from shift to shift and it's so much easier to get by. But a project, you are accountable for many things and everything you do has a digital copy (an email request, a trigger in the system, an initial in the integration testing audit report).

If you can't act or deliver timely (a question during conf call, or they need a powerpoint/ Excel sheet by the end of the day to persuade the big wigs to hire more travlers, or delay the GoLive and lose half a mil), the PM is less likely to think of you when she's hiring for her next project.

7. Project management requires some or a combination of "survivor traits" such as a great mind, symmetrical facial features, and charisma. If you fall out of that bell curve, don't worry, you can make it up with skillful interpersonal skills. In the great words of Kip Fulbeck, "adults act, children react"-- keep your personal feelings checked at the door and turn on the sunshine.

The survivors (they are really sharks, actually) I work with, they have great recall and eyesight that allow them to quickly navigate through a screen filled with a bunch of icons and navigators-- and they don't just stop there. They are able to clearly articulate and explain the relevance of that screen to PM or team members.

Most if not all of them are super articulate, while many of them got the corprorate look.

Frustrated? Don't be, NI is not the only career in this universe. There are plenty of other nursing jobs/ fields that will earn you comparable or more salary with much less GERD/ afterhour works.

8. The upside is your work enviornment is cleaner, it doesn't smell, your patient doesn't hit you or the family doesn't report you; no needle sticks, no med error- potential of losing the RN license you work so hard for. But you have to deal with people and politics (not just your average nursing unit politics b/c no matter how much you fight, you are still needed for the sake of balancing the schedule), and I know a lot of people who get into nursing because they want to avoid that very culture.

9. Use LinkedIn to network. You might stay with one hospital if you are lucky, (if a position's deemed necessary after GoLive or the CNO, CIO really liked your work and wanted to retain you-- but what are the odds of that? Depends on funding and policy) but most likely you are gonna be jumping from job to job like those consultants (who earn twice as you do).

10. At some point, usually 6 weeks before GoLive, you are going have to teach superusers and end users. Can you articulate well and enunciate clearly? Can you handle public speaking or a resistant learner? You need to PROJECT YOURSELF not only for teaching but during con calls and meetings too. Again, that "different kind of reward threshhold" surfaced when taking these into consideration.

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