In 2009, the American government passed the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to protect existing jobs and create new ones. This document led to the enactment of HITECH (Health Informatics Technology for Economic and Clinical Health). Dubbed as groundbreaking medical legislation, it included the plan to invest $25.9 billion in healthcare promotion. It promised to adopt EHRs (electronic health records) of patients and their “meaningful use” to improve healthcare nationwide. More than a decade later, health informatics has revolutionized the medical facilities in the world. It enables the healthcare staff to communicate effectively and concentrate more on patient care. Let’s learn more about this field.
Nine Career Opportunities in Health Informatics
How to define health informatics? It’s an interdisciplinary medical subject that involves the application of information technology to improve patient outcomes. It optimizes the gathering, storing, and distributing of a patient’s records digitally without paper-dependency. Therefore, it reduces costs, enhances collaboration, and makes healthcare a more productive industry. Health informatics – through EHR – empowers patients by making them self-sufficient in the manner of healthcare. Experts estimate this field to expand by 8% this decade. So, health informatics graduates can expect a plethora of jobs in a post-COVID world. Some of the most sought-after careers in 2021 are as follows:
1.Clinical Informatics Analyst
If you love arranging things and organizing them in a pattern, clinical informatics analysis can be your dream job. These professionals manage databases where patient records are kept secure. Thus, collecting, recording, arranging, and protecting this sensitive information will be your responsibility as an analyst. The yearly income of these experts varies significantly. Some earn over $70,000, while more experienced individuals can even make more than $100,000 annually.
2.Informatics Consultants
Are you willing to work on the technical side of health informatics? As a consultant, you’ll make sure that the organization conforms to health informatics federal obligations. Mainly, this task involves supervising software installations and monitoring computer networks. These professionals make around $80-90 thousand every year! Students consider earning a master of science in health informatics degree to consolidate their chances to excel in this profession. Hospitals are now more vigilant to enhance the “meaningful use” of electronic medical records. Consultants sometimes need to travel around, so that’s the adventurous part of this job.
3.Informatics Educator
Health informatics still requires employee training to become normalized in the medical industry. Therefore, institutions hire full-time informatics educators to coach junior-level staff. They create and maintain a curriculum for their areas. This job revolves around decreasing the fissure between IT and our medical professionals. Earning more than $70,000 every year, the informatics education position will gain more popularity with our rising tech-reliance.
4.Clinical Informatics Manager
This profession chiefly deals with administrative work. That’s why some health informatics graduates prefer establishing a career in clinical management. From a supervisor’s perspective, you can control and regulate a hospital’s daily operations and staff’s regular functions. Not only you’ll manage your subordinates, but you also train them. So, this task borrows some features from an informatics educator’s profession as well. You will also handle some responsibilities of a consultant by ensuring compliance with the federal regulations. The yearly income of a clinical informatics manager lies easily between $80-100 thousand.
5.Clinical Informaticist
A healthcare center doesn’t just rely on the collection and storage of digital medical records. But the staff also requires efficient distribution of these documents whenever necessary. A clinical informaticist ascertains that the staff, physicians, and even patients have easy access to these electronic files. These experts make over $100,000 every year since they integrate information technology with traditional medicine possible.
6.Nursing Informatics
This field is related to the profession of nursing. It combines traditional nursing principles with information technology. A nurse’s crucial purpose doesn’t change, however. She/he is still responsible for consoling patients and their distressed families. However, it focuses mainly on evidence-based practice and research-based communication skills. No wonder these nurses make around $90-100 thousand annually. AMIA stated that there is a need for 70,000 nursing informatics specialists in the future. These nurses strive to incorporate modern technological standards into the mainstream clinical environment to enhance medicine’s efficiency.
7.EMR Clerk
Let’s differentiate EMR from an EHR first, shall we? The former is just the digital format of a patient’s charts used in hospitals. However, the latter provides a patient’s medical history since the earliest physician’s visit. An EMR clerk/keeper ensures that data is entered into the computers to create an electronic medical record. In other words, this person converts a paper-based chart into a digital one. They earn $40-50 thousand every year, but that’s just an estimation of the average pay.
8.CMHO
CNBC published a report back in 2018 revealing the third leading cause of death in the United States. You’d be surprised to know that 250,000 Americans died every year because of medical errors. Health informatics utilizes automation to reduce these mistakes and ensure smooth operations in medical facilities. A CMHO (chief medical information officer) supervises all health informatics branches in a hospital. His/her job responsibilities include conducting regular assessments and ascertain that all patients receive the care they deserve. No wonder some of these individuals even make more than $300,000 every year.
9.Pharmacy/Nutrition Informatics
Pharmaceutical professionals ensure that the correct amount of dosage goes into a patient‘s bloodstream. So, they rely on data-driven methods to administer medications, observe results, and improve physicians’ recommendations. Similarly, nutrition specialists make information-based suggestions regarding a patient’s diet intake. These experts make $60-90 thousand on average every year. But experience counts, and with it, your yearly income does increase.
Conclusion
Modern technology has transformed a doctor’s office into a showroom filled with scientific wonders. The miracles of health informatics are visible throughout our country’s medical institutions. It facilitates healthcare professionals to access a patient’s medical history easily and continuously monitor their symptoms. Automation and digitization have rendered paper-based records and manila folders obsolete. It opens multiple career pathways for individuals; these pathways ensure exponential success and rapid career advancement opportunities.