Degrees

Before specializing in Nursing Informatics I'd recommend you obtain foundational knowledge, experience and skills in clinical nursing practice FIRST.

Just as it is not Best Practice for new grads to start out in ICU, Oncology or Surgery before obtaining (at the very least) a years experience on a Med Surg floor,

so too I would not recommend you going straight into the specialty of NI without having (at minimum) a year of hands on nursing practice experience. If you do not know how nursing,medicine and healthcare work you can not begin to learn the competencies necessary to practice in this or any other nursing specialty.

A Masters degree is not necessary to gain entry into this specialty.

I'd suggest you get a job on a Medical Surgical unit + volunteer in your hospital to be a super user for the clinical information system. This would give you the needed clinical experience while at the same time also get you a small taste of the world of information systems and nursing informatics.

Good Luck!

Of course it might be too late now, but if you can, take an intro databases course; always comes in handy cause no matter what system you re involved with, you will always find yourself querying data from tables.

As far as what to do---do get a year of clinical nursing under your belt; it only adds more credence when you're out there implementing systems. NOrmally nurses get pulled on a project; so lets say you're an emergency nurse, and the department decided to implement an electronic medical record; many times the managers of the floors decide that they need extra help and they go to the most computer savvy to help them out. These 'superusers' or 'clinical leads' learn about the system and might help building the system, so that's how you get the experience. Of course, many other ways to get into informatics, but a lot of my nurse friends started by getting asked to help with testing, or help with training the other nurses, and they enjoyed it so much, that they asked if they could help with other stuff, and eventually they had enough experience to go look for a job implementing systems in other hospitals.

I'd recommend applying to an MSN program after your BSN. Walden University has an MSN program in Nursing Informatics.

To my knowledge, there are no BSN degrees in Nursing Informatics.

There are Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) bachelor degrees if you want to focus on health information management.

You can get into Nursing Informatics by having a degree in it (such as an MSN).

Check out: http://www.ania.org