Informatics is a diverse field with many different disciplines given that this is the Health Analytic Insights site, in this blog post I am going to focus on 4 types of informatics disciplines: Health Informatics, Bioinformatics, Pharmacy Informatics and Nursing Informatics. These disciplines have overlapping skills and interests but do have some differences between them.
1. Health Informatics
This field can be described as the use of health and clinical data to drive and support patient health outcomes. There are several case studies that fall under the realm of Health Informatics, for instance, transferring patient data securely within the hospital to various Electronic Health Records. Another example is analyzing patient data from patients who are readmitted back into the hospital and designing a clinical dashboard to track this. Health Informatics can be described as the merging of skills from Information Technology and Healthcare. Health Informatics has subspecialties such as Pharmacy Informatics and Nursing Informatics.
2. Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics can be described as the use of biological data to model and solve problems in fields such as genomics, proteomics and pharmacology. The field of bioinformatics is responsible for the fast development of mRNA vaccines and the work involved with processing large amounts of data from biological experiments. Another example of the work done in this field is the human genome project, the mapping of all the genes that make up human DNA.
3. Pharmacy Informatics
As stated above, Pharmacy Informatics can be considered a subspecialty within Health Informatics. Individuals in this field generally have a registered pharmacy designation or are a registered pharmacy technician. It is important to have experience working as a pharmacist or pharmacy technician to be able to apply technological solutions to improve medication use process and clinical workflow amongst pharmacists within your organization. Therefore, you will often find many of these roles looking for this prior experience.
4. Nursing Informatics
Similar to the Pharmacy Informaticist, the Nursing Informatics role is a specialized role. The definition of nursing informatics provided by the American Nurses Association (ANA) and recommended by HIMSS “is the specialty that integrates nursing science with multiple information and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice.” Therefore, employers are often looking for individuals who have a degree in nursing or who have experience as a registered nurse. Also, these individuals will have experience working with the EHR system to improve clinician workflow.
| Informatics Discipline | General Required Skills | Potential entry-level roles | Places of Work |
| Bioinformatics | Biostatistics, Epidemiology, R, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB, Computational biology | Research Assistant, Junior Bioinformatics Specialist, Computational Biologist | Academic research labs, Government organizations, Medical laboratories |
| Health Informatics | SQL, R, Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, HL7 Standards, Biostatistics | System Analyst, Clinical Decision Support Analyst, Methodologist, Epidemiologist, Clinical Informatics Analyst, Health Data Analyst | Hospitals, EHR/EMR Vendors (e.g. Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH) Government organizations, Healthcare start-ups |
| Pharmacy Informatics | Registered Pharmacy Designation or Registered Pharmacy Technician, SQL, medication use process, clinical workflow | Clinical application specialist, Systems pharmacist, Informatics Pharmacist, Application analyst, Pharmacy data analyst, Pharmacy project manager | Hospital, pharmacy, healthcare start-ups, healthcare consultant agencies |
| Nursing Informatics | Registered Nurse, clinical documentation and workflow, training staff on the EHR use | Application analyst, EHR Implementation Lead, Clinical Analyst Consultant, Epic Application Analyst, Principal Trainer | Hospital, healthcare organization, healthcare start-up |
Looking to become a healthcare data analyst? Check out the course here to learn more!
0 Comments