Technology and health care are two of the fastest-growing career areas in the nation. So it should come as no surprise that medical informatics rates high on nearly every list of hot health care jobs.
Informatics professionals collect and process data, turning health-care information into meaningful metrics. Then they go further, making sense of that data in order to guide decision-making for hospitals, insurance plans and others engaged in health-care delivery.
“We can drive better-quality care, we can lower costs, if we have the data around patients and populations. Informatics is the use of data to drive better health care,” said retired Navy Capt. Michael Weiner, director of healthcare strategic services at IBM.
Technology has been a boon to medical delivery. Electronic medical records, online insurance access and a range of other tools have improved the landscape. But these things don’t operate at full speed right out of the box.
“You just don’t plug those things in and have them work, especially in a small physicians’ practice or in a hospital. You need individuals with clinical knowledge who understand the effect of these systems on all of the users and all of the stakeholders,” said Jeffrey Williamson, vice president of education and academic affairs at industry group AMIA, American Medical Informatics Association.
“That is what draws people to informatics,” Williamson said. “When you understand all the social and technical aspects, then you can know the right steps and processes to implement so that people actually feel like they are empowered to do their jobs.”
Education needed
Many in the profession will have a master’s degree that includes courses in IT, health care, management, health policy and related areas. A growing number of schools offer a master’s degree specifically in health informatics.
Courses may cover database management, electronic medical records, medical language and regulations. Your future job title may be CIO, chief medical officer, compliance officer or IT consultant.
While a master’s helps, it’s not always required at more junior levels. Take, for instance, LabAnswer Consultants, with offices in Texas and Florida. The company helps health-care enterprises implement IT systems and then optimize those systems to generate the best, most effective data sets.
You can get in with a bachelor’s degree, and the company’s human resources manager, Ali Garner, said she’s always eager to look at veterans’ résumés. This kind of work takes a meticulous mindset, “and I like the discipline they bring with them. I like the maturity that they show, the pragmatic way they have of handling themselves. And they often have true leadership skills that people may not recognize,” she said.
The work
Garner’s company works with a range of industries including pharmaceuticals, government and even food and beverage laboratories whose data may have an impact on consumer health.
“We help people manage the data that they create,” Garner said. “We don’t sell a particular software — we help them to implement systems or we help them to utilize their existing systems better.”
Informatics often gets mistaken for a straight IT endeavor. On its face, it may seem to be all about the database — the ability to gather and organize vast volumes of information related to patient care, outcomes and the performance of medical providers.
But the truth goes deeper. At heart, informatics is about meaning — making meaningful use of all that data.
“It looks to solve problems that people don’t even know exist. Gaining insight into data leads us down a pathway toward things that we didn’t know were related,” Weiner said. “At the core of it is the ability to look at what is just an overwhelming amount of data and turn that data into knowledge.”
To demonstrate the point:
While working in a previous job with the Defense Department, the FDA came to him asking whether a drug for Type 2 diabetes might have been raising the rate of heart attacks.
“It seemed like a simple question, but it went deep into the way health care data is recorded or coded. A heart attack can be coded as an acute myocardial infarction; it can be coded just as a heart attack — there are many ways that it is recorded,” Weiner said.
“So it’s not as simple as putting the drug on an Excel spreadsheet and charting it against nine million people who had heart attacks. First we had to go through and find all the different things that mean ‘heart attack.’ “
So informatics isn’t just about data, and it’s not just about health care.
“This is fundamentally a research job. We look at how things work, how they are connected, how are they related, and what can we glean from this data to deliver better-quality care,” Weiner said.
Base of skills
Military veterans from a range of backgrounds can find their way into this expanding field.
Medical experience, for instance, will always be a plus. “Nurses like to talk to nurses, lab people like to talk to lab people. They speak the same language. They understand each other,” said David Luckey, a software systems manager at Dallas-based CTG Health Solutions.
Likewise, an IT background can give a job candidate an edge.
Informatics professionals may have bachelor’s degrees in areas such as medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, or health data requirements and standards. Some employers will accept an associate degree with course work in these areas, or they may look for a professional certification, which is issued by a range of credible bodies including universities and the American Society of Health Informatics Managers.
Informatics professionals document patients’ health information, including medical history, symptoms, examination and test results, treatments, and other data. They organize and maintain data for clinical databases and registries, record data electronically and ensure the privacy of medical records. At the IT level, they build the software and systems.
A day in the life
Informatics can sound abstract, with its unusual blending of technology and medical insight. To make it more real, we asked David Keleti what he does all day. As manager of corporate clinical outcomes at The AmeriHealth Caritas Family of Companies, he’s roughly a middle manager in the world of informatics.
- Arrives at 8:30 a.m., checks email. Hunkers down to tackle ongoing projects. He has a year’s worth of ongoing work in various stages.
- … the statisticians, who prepare the data that forms the basis of Keleti’s analysis and reports. Meet with them via phone, email and in person. This data-gathering is where the rubber hits the road.
- Dodge meetings, where players from across the organization are apt to pull an informatics manager in multiple directions, due to his multifaceted role.
- Sum up everything on paper before going home. “I try to complete a thought so I can pick it up tomorrow. I never want to stop midsentence,” Keleti said.
