Is it important to have experience in different nursing units to become an informaticist?

Specialties Informatics

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It is important for a nurse or health informaticist to have experience in multiple nursing units? I asked this because I am currently working on my Masters in Health Informatics and Information Management while working as a nurse. I am currently working in Stepdown/Tele/Med-Surg unit. I also thought of applying an ICU RN position. My thinking about this is that the more workflow of nursing units I know, the better I understand the needs of nurses once I finally become an informaticist.

I am in a point of re-evaluating my actions and making sure they are parallel towards my goal.

Your response is much appreciated.

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Specializes in Clinical Informatics/IS Analyst.

In my opinion the more experience the nurse has the better, working in informatics...

Dependent on the organization of the informatics department, you may be a liaison for an area that you have zero experience with. The more widespread your knowledge base the better.

I work in a department that has Informaticists for multiple specialties in acute care and ambulatory care. However, during projects/implementations we often work together collectively to support users.

Hope this helps.

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Specializes in informatics for 10 years.

Is it important for a nurse informaticist to have experience in multiple nursing units? Not really.

Look at companies like Cerner or Epic---they hire people who implement their applications without having any nursing experience at all.

I did nursing for 8 years, and floated to many units, except the OR. What was my first application to implement? Yep, an OR application and in my first meeting I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I thought I knew nursing, but yep, had never really stepped into the OR, but on my 2nd day, I met with the OR nurses and they walked me through their workflow. There are always things to learn, no doubt, but is no rocket science to figure out the workflow of any nursing department.

what matters your nursing experience...you can learn any other nursing workflow in days, if not hours. It is not that hard.

I've implemented many departments that I had zero experience in, but learned the workflows without a problem. So no, don't worry about having experience in multiple nursing units..sure, it helps, but believe me, thousands of informaticists out there implementing departments they had never worked in.

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Specializes in Neuro, ED, Cardiac, Clinical Informatics.

Transferring from Med-Surg/Stepdown to ICU is not going to give you that much wider of a base of experience from a workflow/informatics perspective. As the previous respondents pointed out - informatics will be looking at different departments entirely such as L&D, OR, Oncology, RT/ST/OT/PT, Rads, Ambulatory Care, ED, Outpatient Testing, etc. You would have to transfer to a completely different type of care setting to gain the experience and knowledge you are seeking. In some cases, this would be impossible (are you a certified therapist?) not to mention you would run out of time....

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Thank you for your responses. I really appreciate it ?

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I am looking into pursing an degree at University of Miami Health Informatics. I am debating on this or applying to NP schools. I have 10 years as a Med/Surg nurse. I have always enjoyed working with computers and am very good at it. I do have some background in HR and Employee Health as well. I am a little lost as to what exactly does a Health Informaticist do? May I ask what program you are enrolled in? Do you enjoy it? Thank you!

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Specializes in informatics for 10 years.
On 1/15/2020 at 9:01 PM, sweetmalibupine said:

I am looking into pursing an degree at University of Miami Health Informatics. I am debating on this or applying to NP schools. I have 10 years as a Med/Surg nurse. I have always enjoyed working with computers and am very good at it. I do have some background in HR and Employee Health as well. I am a little lost as to what exactly does a Health Informaticist do? May I ask what program you are enrolled in? Do you enjoy it? Thank you!

Plenty of old threads on this forum to answer as to what informaticists do. But if you have 10 years of med surg experience, didn't you ever document on computers? So the role of the informaticist is to roll those out.

LIke right now..the covid19 outbreak. Nurses need to document that somehow. HOw are they going to do that? Well, somebody has to tell the informaticist person, hey, we need a new questionnaire on the computer that asks if the patient has been outside of the country, if they have had a fever, etc. Informaticist looks at the EMR and decides how to best do that, so that the nurse can document it on the computer. So easiest way to explain it, somebody tells you, we are no longer accepting cash deposits by paper, use our new banking app to do so. What do you do? You install the app, learn the app, and maybe configure it a bit (if doable) to satisfy your needs.

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