I have received a lot of positive feedback on a previous post I did, on some of the interview questions I have received during my job search. Since then I have had an opportunity to talk to different individuals who are preparing for the interview process and I wanted to provide some more examples of questions you might be asked during the interview.
Don’t forget to check out How to Get Your First Job in Health Informatics eBook which provides you with interview questions, a step-by-step guide on how to design your own portfolio that will help you stand out, tips on how to structure your resume and much more! 
Let’s jump into the interview questions:
Describe the last time you set yourself a goal or made a commitment where you were unable to meet the deadline? How did you deal with this?
With this question, interviewers may be testing your time management skills. In a health informatics role, you may be balancing and serving several different departments and it is important that you have strong prioritization skills. The interviewer might want to know if you have experience with any organizational tools such as Microsoft OneNote or Asana. If you don’t have any work experience and you are a recent graduate student you may have experience with a citation manager software such as, Mendeley, to organize your references, this is something you might want to point to during the interview. Furthermore, if you have an example where you might have dropped the ball with a commitment, how did you deal with this? Interviewers might be looking to see if you kept your manager and coworkers in the loop, or asked for help in that situation.
Tell me about your educational background and experience and how they prepared you for this position?
This question can be quite stressful for those looking to transition into the health informatics field and might not have a related clinical degree or a degree in health informatics. I wrote a blog post on 4 jobs that can transition into a health informatics role, such as help desk support or a business analyst. Therefore, although you might not have the requested educational degree for the role you are looking for, you might have relevant work experience that you can speak to.
One tip is to know the job requirements of the role you are interested in and find direct examples of how you have similar work experience to what is being asked of. For instance, if the job description is looking for those who have experience training clinical staff on hospital systems think to yourself, do you have any experience at all giving presentations to clinical staff or developing training material that you can speak to during interviews.
Do you have any experience training clinical staff or training end-users in general? Do you have any experience with an EHR or Clinical Decision Support System?
These two questions relate to your experience with training end-users, this could be directly related to positions for the EHR analyst or roles specifically for EHR vendors such as, Epic or Cerner. In this case, if you have experience as a super-user (an individual who has access to additional training or documentation of the EHR system) this will be a great time for you to mention how you have taken initiative to train clinical staff, either formally or informally, and what you have done to improve clinical workflow within your organization.
What are some types of joins in SQL?
This question might be for health informatics roles that lean more on the analytical side in terms of analyzing and working with healthcare data specifically. Some common types of joins include Left, Right, Inner and Outer Joins. You might receive some questions on what are common SQL queries you have used to wrangle the data. You can check out this post here on common SQL queries you should know.
Do you have experience monitoring or developing key performance indicators to evaluate clinical performance?
Again, this question might be for roles that are more analytical in nature but having an understanding of common clinical metrics that might be measured or observed at the healthcare organization you are applying to (e.g., diabetic readmission rate) would be beneficial. When I was applying for health informatics roles, I would always take some time to go on the organization’s website and understand their mission and strategic plan. An increasing number of organizations are beginning to focus on analytics and monitoring the indicators tracked within their organization. Therefore, having knowledge of this would be key to know during your interview.
What is your working style, do you prefer to work alone or in a collaborative environment?
You might find with health informatics roles you are often not working in a silo, it consists of meeting with clinical stakeholders and working for multiple different areas within and outside of the hospital system. Therefore, those who prefer a more collaborative environment might be a better fit. I am not saying there is no time to work alone but many of these roles will lean towards a more collaborative structure of multiple meetings and working with many different individuals with varying backgrounds, to get a project up and running.
Don’t forget to prepare your own individual questions to ask the interviewers!
Credit to Christina Morillo
Example questions to ask interviewers:
Can you give some examples of current projects that other members of the health informatics team have worked on?
What would be a typical day for someone in this role?
There is a need to stay up to date in the health informatics field, are there opportunities for certifications and courses? Is there a budget for personal development?
Let me know in the comments below, what are some interview questions that you have received on your health informatics job search, don’t forget to pick up the eBook to help get your dream job!
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