Certificate or MSN

Since your hospital will be doing a system conversion, this is the best time to get acquainted with your Informatics/IT department by asking to shadow one of them, attend meetings that require end user participation, and become a superuser for them. Get yourself familiarized by them and ask if they have any positions open. You will be able to learn a lot since your hospital is switching to a new system with all the projects and implementations that will happen. Once you get your foot in the door and obtain some experience then decide if you really want an MSN in Informatics.

I just feel like the whole thing at this point is a mess. I'd really like to be able to try and fix this from the inside some day, so I was thinking informatics would be my best route.

As mentioned before, getting some type of experience by getting involved in your current role in the conversion to epic will be the best thing you could do to gain experience in the field.

If you could somehow get involved doing something in that project, that would be the best thing to do. I don't really recommend going for a certificate. What really matters in this field is experience.

Even if you go for a master's, best to also have experience in the field because nowadays you got many nurses who have some type of informatics experience so when you get your master's, you'll be competing for jobs with those. Again, that's why best to get experience if you can in your current role in informatics.

As far as trying to fix the mess, good luck with that. I've implemented projects in different hospitals across the USA and the problem goes deeper than you think. In fact, I've been at some places where the analysts doing the build had zero clinical experience and they got hired to do the job because mommy or daddy pulled some strings since they were related to higher ups.

And if you get an interview, don't ever say you're going into the field because you want to fix the mess.The simple follow up question that will be posed back to you will be, and how would you go about doing that? I'm yet to hear an inexperienced candidate get out of that question alive.

Your MSN isn't required. Become a super user for epic... That will help... You can apply for the informatics position if there is one available....

You could do the certificate but I wouldn't go as far as MSN before having the position... In an interview you can say that's your goal.