strategies to get into NI

rninformatics, DNP, RN · Apr 27, 2012

Greetings nathanfl,

I'm thinking that there may be a few reason why you are having difficulty.

1) HR and hiring managers look at past length of stay related to the jobs you have had - only staying in a position for less than a year, let alone only 6weeks would be a red flag for me.

2) You wrote that you had 3.5 years of experience as a practicing RN. In what specialty? Perhaps the folks you are interviewing with want someone with another specialty or more years of practice experience?

3) Perhaps they want someone with more clinical systems experience, more project management experience, experience with a particular vendor system?

I don't know as I'm not the one who was interviewed. A thought - have you asked the folks you interviewed with, that as you wrote you were "not able to seal the deal" with for feed back as to why they did not select you?

Please feel free to use previously posted advice on this forum. There are several experienced informaticists who frequent and contribute to this forum.

See links below for additional resource that may assist you.

How Do I Get Started in Nursing Informatics? on ADVANCE for Nurses

Nursing Informatics Interview Tips | Nursing Informatics For All

Good Luck!

I was hoping to get some information from y'all regarding how to break into the industry. I have a bachelor's in computer science with over 5 years experience and my ASN with 3.5 years experience, so I have the skill set (I believe). I can get to the interview process, receive excellent feedback, but can never seal the deal. I have some major successes at launching massive, complicated, web applications from a variety of positions, and this can translate very well. At one point I was in an informatics position for 6 weeks and completed in one week what the rest of the team completed in the next 4 months (I left because my wife & I had accepted another position in a different state prior to being approached about the NI position), but I still cannot break in.
I am very frustrated because for the life of me I cannot figure out why, despite having overwhelmingly positive comments during and immediately after the interview.
At this point, I am spending a lot of time researching making my own health IT software.
Any comments would be helpful, and I will answer any questions. Don't hold back!

nathanfl · Apr 27, 2012

Thanks for your comments, I have read those articles and I can provide more information. Regarding #1 and #2, I have worked in telemetry, radiology, and I currently work in burns, I also did a one year internship/residency during the last year of nursing school in CICU. The NI position I had was just a temporary position as I had already given a one month notice of resignation at the hospital, but coincidentally a friend in the NI department did to and recommended me for the position. I gave them six weeks because I was going to be starting my new position, which I had already accepted and even signed a lease for an apartment prior to this new gig.

As for #3, I have super user status for McKesson HED, HEO, as well as AdminRx, and I did train incoming nurses onto the unit in charting, etc. Additionally, during the six weeks that I was in NI, we were doing an HEO with iForms implementation project. I was taken on to right the course of the ship because for 6 months, the group had completed no work despite having HEO installed. I had to first educate myself in HEO, iForms, and VGR - lucky for me this was basically all web development stuff and I had been doing that formally and informally for a decade. I also had to train the NI and clinical system analyst staff in HTML, JS, CSS, Dreamweaver, iForms, McKesson Toolkit, etc. I had to teach the two project managers how to manage a technical project, creating timelines, estimation, etc. I interviewed contractors, wrote training documentation for the IT and clinical staff, documented the project, setup and administered a source code repository, etc. I completed all of the protocol order sets that had been developed by the NI staff in two days and then wrote the VGR to process the orders in two more days. I reported to the CNO and the CTO and things were actually running really well until I left. I had produced hand off documentation and had hand off meetings with each staff individually.

For IT experience, I've only worked on projects, and they've ranged from biometric ID systems, corporate intranets, designing corporate IT infrastructure, data mining and sales analysis applications for executive teams (really advanced versions of dashboards, which I did this on the side as it was worth a lot of money, but alas I didn't realize it at the time), massive vacation sales system for the biggest entertainment company in the world, etc. Really good IT experience.

The whole interview process seems to go really, really well. I always get very positive feedback and so far no one has had anything negative to say which is frustrating because I don't know exactly what I am doing wrong here. The most I have gotten out of anyone was "We've decided to go with someone else." But I can never get an explanation for why.

Thanks for your feedback, I am re-reading those articles you've linked too hoping for inspiration as I have another interview Monday

ikarus01 · Apr 27, 2012

Hello nathanfl,

I suppose none of us can really give you a specific reason as to why you cannot seal the deal, but I can share some of my experiences.

I've also had many many interviews where I thought I did an excellent job, but ended up not getting the job.

In a few occassions i was working with recruiters so they actually had feedback for me as to why I didn't get the job.

For one interview, I did extremely well on the interview with the director. However, I didn't get the position, and according to the feedback, the director said I didn't show enough interest in the position.

What?

Yep, apparently after the interview I didn't specifically say, "I'm really interested in this position, and I'm looking forward to the next step in the interview process."

Therefore that director thought I was interviewing for many jobs, and she figured I must have not been interested in that position so she moved on to the next candidate.

In another ocassion, my resume was the perfect fit for a position I saw advertised online. I made the first interview with a manager, but then I was told that the nursing director determined to move on to another candidate because I was a "flight risk!"

What?

At the time I was working as a consultant and most of my jobs were 8-12 months in length, and yep, on paper, I did look like I would come in to the job, be there for a year, and then quit. At the time though, I was trying to find a 'settle down' type of job, but my resume didn't tell that type of story.

On another interview the feedback I got was that "I was too enthusiastic and they were concerned that I was faking my interest in the job."

I don't even know what that means, but since I have also been on the other side of the table interviewing candidates, I know that if you're interviewing with a panel of people, it only takes one person in that panel to say, "didn't like that guy, let's keep on searching."

Once we had an ex-engineer RN guy who was turned down for an entry level position because some of the nurses in the panel thought he was too cocky and they thought that would create some personality clashes.

I have worked with engineers before, so to me his personality was fine, and even though I argued that he had the brains to do the job, couple of the nurses said that they might have trouble working with an arrogant person. I couldn't convince them that's how many engineers come off as, but in reality, they tend to be nice guys.

And then there was another lady who according to one of the panel members, just gave the wrong vibes. Sayonara to that candidate.

Thus, as you can see, there are simply too many factors out there as to why you might not be sealing the deal.

One thing is for sure though----nowadays employers (mainly hospitals), are looking for candidates with specific application skills. I think prior to mid 2008, as long as you had any vendor experience, you would be hired for a job on the spot. Nowadays is like, oh, so you worked with Cerner radnet in the past. Yea, we have cerner, but we actually want somebody with cerner powerchart experience.

Much luck to you and remember to express interest for the job! I learned my lesson

mariafh · Apr 28, 2012

With your CS background, you might find better luck with a vendor. Not necessarily the nurse who implements the systems and works with the hospital, but actually part of the development team. You could work in software quality, R&D, or learning products (develop training programs, etc). But of course, those positions are not quite the same as the NIS in the hospital. The software quality and R&D positions are definitely more technical. This means you apply not for nursing positions but positions such as software quality enginers, software engineers, developers, etc. You could do system design and usability for example. These jobs are not listed as jobs for nurses, but technical jobs such as with HIMSS or the big job list servers like monster. Although these are technical jobs, they definitely would take advantage of your clinical background. I am a nurse with a technical degree in a technical position, but do many NIS tasks including screen/application design, usability, data modeling, and so on. Note that in the hospital area of NIS, they would prefer a higher nursing degree. But in the world of the vendor, the technical degree is a big plus, even more than the nursing for some positions. Software quality engineers and software developers are not required to be nurses, but in the HIT development world, it is a strong advantage.

nathanfl · May 27, 2012

hey all, thanks for the responses, i truly appreciate the advice. Right now, interviewers are still pitching a perfect game, but I have been through this before with the dot com bust. this time it helps to have an actually fulfilling role as charge RN on a burn unit, so i'm being patient! I've been working on my own software too, which I will post about.