Okay, another field that gets a large number of doctors going into it is the field of informatics and healthcare information technology. So, typically, there’s two different sides that you can go into. You can go in on the vendor side, the person, the company that’s creating, maintaining, selling the electronic health records and the IT. And it’s much more than EHR. They use a lot of healthcare IT, so don’t just think EHR. There’s other things that people do in this field. And then, obviously, on the provider side, the people that are implementing this and using the technology on the provider side for the hospitals and the health systems. You do not need to be a computer geek. You don’t need to be a computer programmer. You don’t need to be a computer major. You need to have people skills. You need to understand the technology. You need to be able to work with people and kinda bridge between the technology and the providers who are actually using this stuff.

Job title. Probably some form of Chief Medical Information Officer, Medical Information Officer, Medical Informatics Officer, Physician Informaticist. I’m amazed I can pronounce that. Now, this is an area where there is a lot of societies, and the two that I would check is HIMSS, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which we have here, and the American Medical Informatics Association, MAIA. Here’s HIMSS. Guess what? They’ve got a job board, okay. And I think that you’re getting the sense here as to…again, especially for researching, for networking, for potential jobs boards, right. Here’s the AMIA, and through their jobs board I was able to print out what the VA Physician Informaticist…my god, I can’t pronounce that…Director. This one is…look at this, it’s for the government. It is remote. That means you can do that anywhere. And, you know, you can pause this. You can read all about this and what-not. This office may eventually manage sustainment of Cerner Solutions for clinical care, etc., etc., etc.. You’re basically implementing Cerner stuff here.

And then you’ve got some other jobs here: Chief Health Informatics Officer in Honolulu. That sounds good. We’re coming into winter here in Massachusetts. And you can do your homework, right. Here’s from Indeed. Here’s an Associate Chief Medical Information Officer at Penn State Health Services, Licensed Physician with at least six years of practice experience, MDDO. We don’t have the rest of it here, but this is a little bit of research of what you can do. Physician Informaticist at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. Again, give you a sense here. You can pause this, you can look at this. You’re gonna work with the software vendors, actively participate in technical and clinical support needs, provide clinical data interpretation, serve as a liaison between clinicians, clinical operations, and information systems departments, right. What’s a nice thing about healthcare IT? This could be a good thing. This could be a bad thing. It’s always changing, right. New stuff is coming out. You can do things better, hopefully, you know, quicker, you know. You know, obviously,…

I will tell you…well, I guess I’ll tell you one story. I mean, obviously, a lot of people here are absolutely…that are listening to this and actually despise EHR. It’s probably one of the top 10 reasons why people tell us they want to get into a non-clinical curric. because they just despise everything that you have to do with it. And, you know, that’s good, but that’s a problem. And I think a lot of people recognize that’s a problem, and if you do a job like this, either on the vendor side or on the provider side, maybe you can help fix that problem. So maybe think about it that way, and we’re gonna talk about keeping an open mind. Here are the top 10 EHR vendors by overall market share in the U.S., and you guys will be familiar with a lot of this stuff: Epic, Allscripts, Cerner, McKesson, etc., etc., etc.. So, you know, definitely a field that is, you know, is not going away.

I’ll give you one more example here from the provider side, if I can, which you have in your book. Here’s a Physician Informaticist on the vendor side, a job with Cerner, and they’re looking for three years of clinical experience in this particular one, you know. And we’re gonna talk about positioning yourself with jobs like this. So the jobs are out there. Like I said, this is another big bucket that doctors get themselves into. Your job, find out what’s right for you. Narrow it down to 2, 3. Continue to explore, continue to learn before we talk about how to actually make that transition.