There are many trends in healthcare information technology to cover. With the US government’s economic stimulus package geared to improve heathcare IT, there will be areas were expertise will be greatly needed.
Outlined below will touch on 5 hot trends that will be need qualified professionals to help implement the large efforts of the healthcare industry:
1. EMR (electronic medical records) or EHR (electronic health records) – This is going to a huge effort on the part of many medical establishments. This system will take the “health history” of an individual and create a so called electronic medical record that will follow a patient anywhere for patient safety and more accurate treatments. All of the is over a huge network and storage systems along with integrating several applications.
Job Title Examples: Developers, Programmers, Project Managers, Billing and Coding specialists, systems analysts but most will say EMR or EHR.
2. Informatics – Informatics as it related to healthcare will include using medical information from clinical, nursing, medical, biotechnology and similar disciplines into an electronic format to be either stored, retrieved, shared, analyzed to help make informative medical decisions.
Job Title Examples: Clinical informatics analyst, Informatics consultants, medical informatics – employers may seek specific degrees in the discipline (ie. RN, BSN, Biotechnology )
3. Enterprise Architecture – Enterprise architecture with work within a healthcare organization like in other institutions. It is most commonly used to better outline a method of business and uses tools to understand and best document the structure of an organization. Very much strategic in nature.
Job Title Examples: Almost always will have the terms “enterprise architecture” or “data architecture” or “data modeler” in the title. Usually a mix of SOA, data warehousing, ER modeling, Diagram modeling, frameworks, and strategy.
4. Patient Safety related systems & Quality – This area of healthcare will use systems and applications to reduce with the goal to eliminate medical errors in and efforts to drastically increase healthcare quality and communication.
Job Title Examples: Quality and patient safety will usually be part of the title and are non technical. The technical positions will be developers/programmers or applications tester of these types of applications.
5. Interoperability – Overall this area covers bringing together healthcare information technology systems together and integrating them in order for them to work together across locations and then have the ability to deliver quality useful information to service it’s end user.
Job Title Examples: Project management, software engineer, sometimes within informatics, architect and, analysts.
There is so much to know within each of these 5 but there is much opportunity for one with technical skills to seek out so many facets of healthcare.