New Opportunities for Nurses beyond Informatics

[hollyvk, BSN]

Nursing Informatics focuses generally on hospital-based EHR work, mainly assisting staff with how to work with the EHR system the hospital uses. Hence knowing how EPIC, Meditech or Allscripts software works is a big plus. And if you don't want to work for a hospital, then consider looking into working for one of the EHR software vendors.

But there are jobs well beyond those two realms. The software vendors rely on other companies/vendors for various components that are used with their software. Such companies include: IMO, Clinical Architecture, Health Language, Cerner, Apelon, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, ManTech Health, and Regenstrief LOINC.

I work in the sub-specialty area of clinical terminology, which encompasses the diagnosis terminology of SNOMED together with the financial/billing terminoloy sets of ICD-10 and CPT, as well as an ever expanding list of other terminologies for other specific uses, such as lab (LOINC) or mental health (DSM-5).

Hospital systems, insurance companies, and other entities now have massive amounts of data they can pull from patients' EHR sources. The newest focus is on doing analytics on that data and being able to extract data for specific uses, such as to identity social determinants of health. The job market for these uses as an analyst is huge, so if you are analytically-oriented, learn as much as you can about using excel spreadsheets and how to set up SQL queries. So job searches for "healthcare analyst" and "clinical analyst".

[Cheri234, BSN]

This is very helpful, thank you for this!

[CanesRN]

Thank you for posting this!