ikarus01

Miami---From my past experience, which is about 5 years ago, hospitals in that area always were low balling in salary, even with experience. The other issue happening now is, obviously, a saturated market. I do consulting and only reason I have not gone back to a full-time job is because of the lower salaries being offered by hospitals. I would have said that maybe to start out 85k would be a good base salary for someone starting out, but what I'm seeing is, hospitals low balling candidates because the supply of "analysts" is too much at the moment. And yes, given that it is Miami, I thought salaries would be higher in that area, but I found out they weren't. I would say, get the interviews, and see what the offers are. I know, not much of an advice, but right now the market is....beyond saturated to say the least, unless you're in the revenue cycle space.

My first place of employment (eons ago--mid 90's--- ?) had a legal nurse do an in service about writing proper nursing notes. Back then, there was no Cures Act that allowed patients to see notes, but the lesson we learned was, if we were writing notes that we thought the patient or family would be upset to read, then we were writing them wrong. The emphasis was on writing neutral, objective notes. It's been so long to give specifics, but I do remember that one of my notes was chosen because I wrote "patient was upset because his pain medication had not been given..." ?and the objective correction was, "patient expressed concern about the pain medication wait time." Something along those lines...We learned so many things never ever taught in nursing school, unfortunately. So maybe in addition to hiding notes, maybe also learning about writing notes from a legal perspective could help in writing notes that you don't want family members to see. I know that when I did travel nursing and I told other nurses about writing "legalese" notes, most if not all, were amazed that they had never heard of that concept. Then again, this in the mid-late 90s, so no clue how things have changed. Maybe now nursing schools offer a class on writing objective nursing notes from a legal perspective.

First thing, look at many of the posts here...a lot of people looking for preceptors. I myself don't understand the concept---you're paying thousands of dollars for a degree, and then you're on your own looking for a preceptor. Imagine going to nursing school and being told, yea, you're on your own in finding your own clinicals. Simply dumb... As far as the pros/cons....if your goal is to become a leader the master's degree helps, but then again, you could get it in business and it wouldn't matter. Got couple of friends in executive boards and all they got is experience and a bachelors. As far as finding jobs...I've seen a couple of roles where you have 5 candidates and 4 of them have masters degrees, yet the one who got the role was the registered nurse who expressed more passion for the role. Maybe the masters degree gives you an open door to apply for jobs? Personally, when we have interviewed candidates, we are looking at thought process, experience with the software either as a superuser and how questions are answered. Again though, some roles in leadership do want a masters degree, but again, you might need to have the experience in the field before you're even considered. Oh yea...and finding a job...you could find a job without a masters degree. Plenty have done it.

I have always been an advocate for trying to get a job with your current experience. It seems that a nursing informatics degree opens the doors to interviews, but it does not guaranteed a job. I should know since at one my former employers, when they posted an analyst role about a year ago, they had dozens of applicants. The final 5, 3 had a master in informatics, 1 was a floor nurse, 1 was an informatics trainer. Guess who got hired? The floor nurse. Her personality came across more as somebody who wanted the job for the right reasons. If you have the money and time, the master's doesn't hurt, but you should be getting involved in anything informatics now, applying for jobs and see how that goes.

do you know if your hospital reports the unvaccinated as the CDC does? If you took 1 dose of 2, for example, you fall under the unvaccinated category. Or do those stats consider 1 dose of 2 as vaccinated?

You don't need to get an RN to go into informatics; I have worked with CNA's and LPN's who are now analysts or trainers. Epic specialist---what specifically is your role with this job title? Are you doing elbow support? Training? The next move, would be to apply for the next role up from your current role. I've also worked with elbow support trainers who when the opportunity presented itself, applied for the analyst role, got the job, and now they are certified in that module. Now, sure, you can go for your RN, and then try to apply for informatics jobs, nothing preventing you from doing that, but why not just try to hustle and see what is the next job you can get within Epic?

I actually laughed at this because I had the same question in my brain. This could have just been written as, Some/a few vaccinated patients are winding up in the ICU. Future politician in the making.

In the past 4 weeks, have had 2 family members who are boosterized with pfizer end up in the hospital with covid. One in her late 50's living in California, another one in her late 40's who lives in Florida. I just spoke to one last night and she said that while in the Florida ER waiting to be admitted, she met another person who was vaxxed with covid and her floor nurse told her that they are seeing a lot of vaccinated people admitted to the hospital. I must say, from the little news I read, I was under the impression that not many vaccinated are making it to the hospital. What are you guys actually experiencing? I was trying to find the data, but unlike in Europe, it seems that in the USA they are not breaking the data by series of shots given.

hahaha! Definitely not. But I still remember that shift so clearly because it really "shocked" me. That director always wore scrubs when I went to that floor. Don't think I ever saw another nursing director like that on the floors. Most were nicely dressed and only came to run somebody under the bus! ?

Back in 2004 or so, was working as an agency nurse, and would mainly get sent to an orthopedics floor where everybody was very unhelpful. One weekday, I was sent to a med surg floor. As soon as I step in, I'm told, you have an admission coming in. As I'm getting report, I get a call, your patient is here. Once report is done, I go check on that patient, as I'm entering the room, another nurse is coming out, and she says, "I got the vital signs, got the admission paperwork started." I thought, wow, that's nice. I figured it was maybe a nurse from a previous shift leaving. Once I did the paperwork (yes, no EMR's at this place then), I come back to the nurses station, and I see the nurse who got the vital signs and did most of the admission paperwork in an office. I asked the secretary, who is that? And says, that's the nursing director. What? Then it took less than an hour to see how everybody was helping each other on that floor. It was so different from the ortho floor. After doing 2 more shifts on that floor I realized---everybody's attitude on this floor is so different in terms of helping each other because the nursing director, even though she could have just closed her door, wear fancy outfits as part of her title, she was always around eager to help other nurses. And her helpful attitude was contagious. I remember other agency nurses coming to that floor saying, I love this floor because everybody is so helfpul. Then I observed the director of the ortho floor, and yep, door always closed, never around to help. That nursing director from that floor, although I barely spoke to her, made such an impression that it really taught me the phrase, it all starts from the top!

I have a degree in nursing and CS...been working in the field since early 2000's. I write my name as, John Doe I guess I'm doing it wrong! ?

Been in the so call informatics field since 2005, started as a Surginet analyst, then switched over to become a consultant, then became physician provider support in epic, then epic analyst. For me personally, I want a job that gives me the ability to travel and see different cities, experience different cultures. Thanks to these jobs, I've been sent to Europe and Latin America. But the best part was the ability to work remotely for many years, and since I could work from anywhere, moved to Europe and traveled all over there, learned 2 additional languages, and have enjoyed my life. My bachelors degree has been good enough to allow me to do that, and since I'm not the type who enjoys office politics, getting an advanced degree to have a leadership role has never been my goal, but seeing the world has. The most painful part in the past was finding employers that would allow remote work, but with covid19, the old guard who believes you have to be in the office 24/7 to do any work is finally realizing that their medieval beliefs will be significantly decreased, if not almost completely abolished!

Most NI programs are....a bit lacking. If I were you, I would spent time learning SQL because no matter what vendor software you work with, reports are always a hot commodity. And even if you are not in charge of doing reports, requests will always come in that will require you to think in terms of queries. You can learn basic Acess online, and then pick up SQL too.

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.

So prior to the covid outbreak, the cost to get certified was 26k per certification. And I know because when you take a job as an epic analyst in some hospitals, they tell you that if they send you out to get certified and then you quit in less than a year or 2 (varies by hospital), you have to pay the total cost of the certification. So I asked for a breakdown of the costs and the weird part was that the training was I believe 3600 dollars. But then they had additional lines like HR expenses and can't remember the exact name, but something like, continuing training and that was I want to say close to 10k. All that, plus travel, added to 26k. So the HR piece I didn't understand, but yea, you can't just sign up on your own. But if you were just to pay for the certification itself and were to airbnb, I don't think it would be more than 5k. However, you can't do that, and I'm sure there are managers on this forum that knon how these expenses work, but they are too skurred to reavel anything epic. :)