Explore a Medical Career in Health Care Information Technology

Technology at its best makes people's lives easier. Health care information technology is a multibillion dollar industry employing clinicians, software engineers, marketers and business developers with the goal of creating streamlined, evidence-based technology that facilitates safe, high quality patient care for all facets of health care.

The interface between health care IT and medicine is medical informatics, an industry that has exploded during the 21st century with the advent of the electronic medical record, often abbreviated EMR. Now EMRs outnumber paper-based record systems in hospitals.

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Variety is the order of the day for a medical informatics professional. Top daily priorities might include determining strategy for upcoming projects with the chief medical information officer, participating in software design sessions, communicating new software updates and solutions to end users, personally working in the computer systems and testing out new options and, most importantly, educating users on technology and obtaining feedback on how to make things better.

"If you enjoy working with IT to improve quality, efficiency, and patient safety, then consider a career in informatics," says Dr. William Smith, a ssistant p rofessor of h ospital m edicine, a ssociate i npatient m edical d irector of i nformation s ervices and d irector of c are c oordination at Emory University Hospital Midtown.

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There is no one direct specialty path to medical informatics. Prospective and current medical school students can research institutions online that have fellowships in clinical informatics. Smith trained in internal medicine because he relishes caring for patients with complex diagnoses and integrating best medical practices over a wide range of clinical genres.

"I liked knowing a lot about a lot, being a true sleuth," he says.

Labs, X-rays, exams and consultations generate mind-boggling amounts of data that require simultaneous processing. The aggregation and assessment of a multitude of health care data points allows physicians, nurses and pharmacists to make evidence-based and patient-specific diagnosis and treatment plans. Patient safety has been improved by technology through reduction of medication errors and availability of medical records across the hospital and across the country.

Medical informatics encompasses many disciplines including consumer health, clinical informatics , clinical research and public health in a variety of ways that endeavor to improve the health of patients with technology. Examples include how consumer health informatics encompasses health literacy by identifying novel uses for biometric devices, such as fitness trackers.

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Clinical informatics professionals work with physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other health care providers to create tools that improve workflow for the betterment of patients. Clinical research information professionals are at the cutting edge of new disease discovery and new treatment techniques. Reviewing Internet searches for flu symptoms to track and predict flu outbreaks is an example of the positive intersection of medicine and technology by public health informaticists.

On - the - job training in informatics is not uncommon. However, since 2014, fellowship training in clinical informatics has been available to physicians who have completed residency training in emergency medicine, internal medicine, medical genetics, pathology, pediatrics, preventive medicine, anesthesiology and diagnostic radiology.

Although not at the bedside directly, medical informaticists deliver great care to patients. Informatics propagates healthy communities by using technology to prevent and predict disease, increase health literacy and advance research.

Sylvia E. Morris received her M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine and Master's in Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. A former assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, she is currently an independent health care consultant and a community health advocate. Find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.