*Disclaimer: I do not believe in providing unpaid internships because I think that it restricts these opportunities to people who have the financial means to take them, however, many degree programs have this as a requirement for completing their program.
I have heard from several students that they are having challenges finding a practicum opportunity and preceptor to fulfill this requirement for their degree program. Many of them are unable to find a preceptor to guide this work and this is most likely a result of the expected amount of unpaid hours the preceptor would need to contribute at around 150 hours over 16 weeks. Many of the students who have reached out to me have commented that unfortunately, the program they are in has not provided any support when it comes to fulfilling this important part of completing their degree.
The first thing I would start with is to see if your program has an alumni network, see if you can reach out to people who graduated from your program on LinkedIn and ask them how they obtained their preceptor opportunity. This will help you to understand if there is already an existing organization or individual who provides practicum opportunities. This would definitely be the best-case scenario if not, read on for more tips on how to find a practicum opportunity…
In this blog post, I want to provide some avenues that students can look into when it comes to finding a practicum opportunity to complete their Master’s Degree in Health Informatics.
- Search large health informatics organizations for internship opportunities.
Organizations such as HIMSS or AMIA have relevant internship opportunities and you can reach out to the contact information of these posted internships and see if there are any opportunities they can match you with.
For example, as of writing this post, AMIA has posted the Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Summer Research Internship Program that you could look into further to see if there are opportunities to partner with this university.
You can also check out the International Medical Informatics Association where they have a Student and Emerging Professional Group to see if there are any researchers in this group, who would have available practicum opportunities
You can also check out internship sites such as Zintellect, Indeed and LinkedIn and search for “unpaid health informatics” or “health analytic internship” or “informatics practicum” - Search for research opportunities within your university/college or your neighbouring institution.
Reach out to professors via email from a relevant discipline (e.g., health informatics, health administration, health IT etc…) to see if they would need research students over the summer to help them out with their projects. I would contact several professors as they are notoriously busy and get multiple emails asking for opportunities. Make sure to tailor your email and read their published research papers so you have an understanding of what projects they are currently working on. - Attend health informatics events and competitions to network and meet potential future preceptors
As the weather gets nicer, get out and attend relevant health informatic events or healthcare data competitions. I had the opportunity to attend several Hacking Health events where I worked on a clinical problem with clinicians and developers and this helped me to connect with several people. As you grow your network within this discipline this will allow you to reach out to people to see if they have or know of others who have opportunities.
If you find a preceptor and are unsure of what project you could work on, I have developed a course that will guide you through building a dashboard which showcases a variety of clinical metrics such as readmission rates, patient satisfaction scores and more. If you have a preceptor you can work through this course with them and have a basis for how to carry out your discussions with them over the 16-week period of the practicum.
The course Learn the Skills to Get Your First Role as a Healthcare Analyst can be taken by you and can act as material for your preceptor to discuss with you over the practicum period. This will remove the additional work that the preceptor might have to do on their end trying to figure out what they should teach!
4. Reach out to community health organizations or hospitals
This avenue might be a little more challenging to explore due to healthcare data privacy concerns that exist with sharing health data with individuals, who are not part of their organization. This might limit the projects that you could help work on, however, community health organizations might have data projects that don’t directly deal with patient data such as resource management. I would suggest reaching out to the volunteer services at your local community health organization and see if there are any available opportunities. You can check a website such as the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics and go to the volunteer section to see if any clinics are looking for technical services near you.
In addition, here is a list of healthcare data competitions and volunteer opportunities that might be of interest to you, also try and find offline events to get the benefit of in-person collaboration.
Healthcare data competitions:
Healthcare ML Contest
AI Competitions
Big Data and AI Events
Driven Data Competition
Kaggle Competition
Healthcare Analytics Case Competition
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Competition
Volunteer opportunities:
Broad Street Institute
Catchafire
VolunteerMatch
Public Health Institute
JSI
EncompassWorld
Clinton Health Access Initiative
Metrics for Management
I-Tech
WiDS Datathon
Tech Volunteer Opportunities
Data Science Volunteering
Ultimately, it might not be easy to find a practicum opportunity so you want to start looking as early as possible and try and grow your network, so you can find the right person or organization. I hope this blog post has provided you with different avenues to explore to find your next practicum!
0 Comments