DataJack BSN-RN

I know this is a >month old post, but just seeing this. At my facility, this is shared between Informatics and Quality. Informatics provides the reports and the data while Quality does the attestations. I really have minimal involvement in this, but one of our informatics managers has been coordinating with the Quality Departments from the different sites. I think it's pretty bad that they handed it to you to navigate without precepting or coaching. This is pretty important stuff. They should have paid a consultant IMOH.

Yes to all your questions. I think you might be confused because you might be thinking "either this or that," but the answer is all of the above. The biggest difference for me was going from a front-line and critical role to a supportive one. My role as a nurse informaticist will always be support - for nurses, for physicians, for leaders. I teach EHR, I audit medical records, I troubleshoot technical and workflow issues, I investigate significant events (and what role the EHR played), I assess the need for improvement (of the EHR), I brainstorm user engagement (of the EHR), I present my findings to leaders, I sometimes coordinate EHR-related projects, I build reports (extracted from EHR data), and I learn new content in a growing technological environment. On my informatics team, there are people with different backgrounds (not necessarily clinical) and we all have different roles, but some may bleed over. I am not a leader by personality, but I have a knack for technology and I have a good grasp of nursing and patient care. However, I find myself always being thrust into leadership roles, or at least engaging other leaders (managers, directors, and chief execs) because no one else in the hospital knows the EHR better than I do.

Hi, Have you tried typing f6 to write in the comments after hitting your character limit?

I recently crossed over to Informatics and I still have a membership with ANA. I was just wondering what professional organizations are people on this board members of? My first inclination is to cancel ANA and join ANIA, for the resources, support, and free CNEs. I don't have my Masters but I do want to start working towards board certification and figured ANIA would provide some informatics-specific CNEs. Is it a good idea to keep my ANA membership? Thanks in advance!

When you hear the term 'health technology' what do you think it means? Anything that involves computers and devices that make the transfer of health information more convenient and more secure and thereby the execution of care safer. When it comes to health technology, what is your biggest struggle? I feel like we are a bit behind as far as technology being integrated in the hospital workflow. Why do we still use paper? Why do devices (like IV pumps) still not interface with the EHR? What is your biggest frustration with the health technology you use? Bloated user interface and limited interoperability between departments. Certain devices are still not interfacing with the electronic health record. Not every application we use is fully interoperable with the current EHR. When it comes to health technology, what are your biggest goals right now? Right now, at my job the biggest goal is to get all hospitals and organization within the healthcare system using one system. There are still branches that use legacy systems that are outdated and, because of culture and politics, they haven't made the leap to the more updated EHR. Generally speaking, what has been one of your biggest challenges in the past year? The COVID-19 pandemic stretched the Informatics department in terms of creating new builds pertaining to COVID and educating huge influxes of agency nurses as well as FT nurses. Along with the pandemic, there were challenges in documentation because nurses spent less time with the patient than they normally would to prevent overexposure and possible breach in PPE. A lot of time spent back-documenting and overriding barcode scanning which is not best practice. If you could change one thing about your life in the next year, what would it be? I would want to learn more about data administration and expand my knowledge to health data analytics. If you had $200 to fix any ONE problem in your life right now, what would that problem be (and what would the fix be)? My car radio is busted. I would like to replace that to make driving more enjoyable!

Great!! I'm glad you chose Informatics. Hoping for the best for you!

Hi JLA, Hopefully your interviews went well this week. I am a clinical informatics coordinator and I have also worked in case management. Both are good nursing jobs that have a different scope than your traditional bedside position. CM pros: I was able to see many patients' courses through their hospital stays and be involved in the care and discharge planning of many patients rather than a few. I learned Interqual criteria (utilization review), the medical criteria many insurances use to justify a patient's stay in the hospital and therefore reimburse hospitals accordingly. I learned the importance of length of stay, not only from a risk perspective (think nosocomial and also readmission), but also from a reimbursement perspective. CM Cons: Doctors avoid you, and will flat out yell at you for trying to manage their patients. Unless, of course, you work in a hospital where everybody sees each other as part of a team! I've been posting about informatics in this forum and and honestly I am just getting my feet wet in the field. There are many here that are veterans and have shared their experience. You can definitely search the forums. I like it so far, especially because I've always been a tech-head. Also a very different perspective (I feel very corporatey) since Informatics affects the management of data throughout the whole hospital system.

Hi Len, I'm sure that you know but you can search the board for people who have the same questions and have a similar situation as you. Coding, Analytics, and Informatics are three very different things to be involved in. As a nurse I would recommend being involved in nursing informatics first (if you don't have an IT background), so that you will get your feet wet in the field, meet people in IT and Analyst departments and work closely with them. If you have an IT background or an IT bent and you can learn things like coding and database administration very easily I believe all you need to do is start networking and prove that you can be useful to those departments. Just FYI, Informatics involves things like EHR implementation, seeing where changes need to be made for efficiency, educating staff on use, etc. Coding and Analytics are not Informatics, per se, but coders can be definitely be EHR analysts who work closely with Informaticists and build the product. Likewise, Analytics deals less with Informatics and more with research and business intelligence and all that. Again, ask around, shadow people, read articles, be more familiar with the field and, above all, be sure it's something you can see yourself be passionate about.

@Len One other thing. I believe that clinical skills are very important, and clinical experience is just as important in the Informatics world as technical skills. This is because as an Informatics Nurse you will be primarily working with the end user (staff RN, physicians, ancillaries) and improving their experience. Teaching is a huge part of informatics. I don't necessarily love it, but it just comes with the job. If you have other technical skills, that will only serve you in the long run because there many opportunities to branch out. Just know that the learning curve could be steep because it feels like a totally new career path. I find that leadership (project management and implementation) is a clear path in Informatics. You can also be a consultant, depending on what EHR certifications you want to obtain. If you like health analytics and are great with data, spreadsheets, and graphs that could be the path for you. If you like building (EHR, workflow templates, etc.) you work very closely with analysts and that door is definitely open for you. There are a myriad of options for you. And, as a clinician with a nursing background, job security and salary will not be a problem, in my opinion. My advice is to have some sort of idea where you want to go in informatics and if you don't, just ask around and connect with an informatics team in your area.

I've worked most of 2020 as a staff RN in an urban community hospital intensive care unit. The census was so full that in order to have a clean ICU we had PACU nurses take crash courses in critical care just so we can have a clean unit for people to go to. I would also float to COVID-19 units where patients had mild to moderate to severe symptoms. So, I typically saw a range of severity from dry cough to intubation (sometimes would even witness this progression on the same patient struggling for weeks on optiflow O2). I've seen people in their 20s-30s die from COVID-19 and no apparent medical history. I think I've had 11 drips/IV bags at the most infusing into one patient. I've also seen an elderly couple extubated and survive after almost 3 months in the hospital. Their story made it on the news. I once had a mother who had caught it from the son who had participated in a protest. The mother died after a month and the son had to live with that guilt. For a while each nurse's goal was to keep their patient a live until the next shift. It seemed like we had progressively gotten better at treating the disease until mid-August when it started to feel like March again. I always try to keep in mind that we see the worst cases in ICU. But I do get annoyed at people who are seemingly oblivious to it all (by choice) and who outright deny the severity of this disease. Even if the vast majority of people only have mild symptoms, why even be flippant about the spread of Covid? Incidence is directly proportional to mortality.

Hey Kate, Someone once told me that job titles can be misleading and you really have to look at the job description or else directly ask the managers for their own expectations of the job, ESPECIALLY in informatics. Some common ones you will see are "Informatics Nurse", "Clinical Informatics Administrator/Coordinator", "RN Data Analyst", "Informatics Site Support Analyst" -- something along those lines. Depending on the organization and their particular flavor of EHR and informatics team, many responsibilities will bleed over job titles. My position teaches end users the EHR (both physicians and nurses in a 1:1, virtual, or classroom environment), runs data reports for leadership, investigates need for EHR changes (big process for this), on-call EHR site support type work like helpdesk/troubleshooting, as well as being a general tech guy for nurses I already have a working relationship with. I literally just helped someone with their iPhone the other day, but I'm able to log it in as productivity. I'm pretty new to the field, but as you can see, I'm getting my feet wet in all sorts of puddles. The main thing to keep in mind is to always pace yourself, be willing to learn new things, and enjoy the journey. You'll hear a lot of criticisms like "that's not nursing" and "you're going to lose your skills" or "that job isn't stable." Tune those out to: "Only a nurse can do what I do. I'm gaining a new set of skills on top of my clinical experience. I'm further along in my career than I would be otherwise because I'm doing what I like to do."

Hi there, I think it depends on what kind of informatics you want to do. I have a BSN and will be completing my MSHI at some point. I am currently in an inpatient informatics team that has both nurses and people with IT backgrounds. The difference between RN and IT is clinical experience and technical experience. In regard to the EHR, RNs focus more on teaching (nurses and doctors) and coordinating while the IT people focus on building the training environment and troubleshooting. Some have the same certification, but mostly it's nurses that focus on clinical documentation. We all have an EHR site support rotation. We also have data analysts we work close with, but they are not part of the Informatics team as they have their own responsibilities. My suggestion is to ask the Informatics team where you work what their workflow is like. Some nurses on my team have taken a completely IT route and pursued Data Analysis/Engineering, but that is heavily dependent on your skills and experience as well as education. I may also be interested in this at some point in the future.

Hi Sara, the job hunt is always the catch 22 for newbies, right? Don't be discouraged. Keep at it. In the meanwhile, if you are still working a clinical/bedside role I would recommend that you get in touch with your quality team/committee and see what projects you can help with. In my hospital, informatics and quality seem to always interact (quality needs reports, informatics *is* reports!) and you could probably begin networking with the Informatics/data team while at the same time you're part of a productive quality improvement project that you can bullet-point on your resume.

Hi Koki, I have a friend who is also a nurse who taught himself SQL, and now has the current title of Senior Analytics Engineer and I'm pretty sure he works in predictive health analysis. I am interested in database management and analysis and also telehealth informatics so I took his advice and am teaching myself SQL. Sometime in the future I would like to work for a company that does predictive health analysis also. The organization he mentioned at the time is called Health Catalyst.

Len, it seems like we were at a similar situation. It really does depend on you want to be. Here are my reasons for leaving the bedside, and no offense to anyone who works bedside. I have a 9 year nursing background in several units that ranges from behavioral health to intensive care. I knew straight from nursing school that I did not want to be 45 years old and changing and turning heavy patients. Either I was gonna go into management or, more likely, because of my affinity for all things computerized, go into informatics. Only took me 9 years and six units to decide to into informatics. Unit management seemed very politcky and high stress, so I went to school for informatics (had to stop d/t personal reasons). Actually, my window of opportunity for informatics finally opened this year and I took it. Informatics is broad but you have to first know it's like a totally new world. Yes, you can teach EHR stuff, but there's a whole world out there ranging from data analytics (which I'm highly interested in and am currently teaching myself SQL), Tele health (great for if you havr quality backgrounds), but most importantly I'm interested in being an informatics leader. How is the pay, you ask? The cards were in my favor and I got a more than 10% increase. And I didn't even finish my masters. So I went from working three 12 hour shifts in the ICU last year to working 5 days a week, off weekends and holidays, low COVID-19 RISK (I have little ones and a sickly mother-in-law), making 20k more than I did last year. And I'm very excited about more windows of opportunity out there. I know I might be talking it up, but from having been in many different nursing fields, I'm very satisfied that I found the one that I intend to keep. Hope this helps. Let me know if you have other questions.