5 Transferable Skills to Transition to a Career in Health Informatics

Health Informatics is a fairly new field, as a result, not everyone will take the “straight” path of getting a degree in Health Informatics and then a job in the field. There are many people who end up in Health Informatics from a variety of backgrounds. Some people come from the clinical side (i.e. Nursing Informatics), some people come from the technical side (i.e. help desk at the hospital) and some people have neither clinical nor technical skills but have transferrable skills that are beneficial to roles in Health Informatics.

1. Project management skills
   
   People who have prior experience working as a Project Manager or as a Business Analyst have the skills necessary to be successful in Health Informatics. In this field, it is likely that you could be working with various external stakeholders, from both technical and clinical departments of your organization. In this case, you will need to be able to run effective meetings, outline requirements and reduce scope-creep for projects.
   
   
2. Analytical skills
   
   People who have prior experience working in academic labs such as Research Coordinators or Research Assistants have transferrable skills that could help transition them to working in the field of Health Informatics. Working in Health Informatics, your day-to-day job duties may consist of analyzing healthcare data from multiple sources. You could be analyzing data from a variety of sources from the lab, oncology, EHR (electronic health records) or EMR (electronic medical records). It is likely that data coming from these sources will need to be linked by common identifiers (i.e. patient health number). In addition, it is likely that the data coming from these data sources will be raw and unstructured and it will be up to you to transform the data into actionable information for clinical staff.
   
   
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3. Clinical knowledge
   
   People who have had prior clinical experience working in hospitals or other healthcare organizations, such as nurses and pharmacy technicians, can transition into a role in Health Informatics. In fact, Nursing Informatics is a subset of Health Informatics, as nurses understand the clinical workflow of the hospital and can learn the technical skills needed to succeed in Health Informatics along the way. For instance, people who have clinical knowledge can advise on improvements to the EHR/EMR as they are the ones often entering the information into these systems.
   
   
4. Programming skills
   
   People with a background in Computer Science or Software Engineering can also be successful in this field. Understanding foundational logic, syntax and being able to pick up programming languages quickly will be helpful in this field. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is used to communicate with databases. Working in Health Informatics you might have to deal with healthcare databases that contain multiple tables of health data that are joined together by a primary identifier (e.g. the patient health number). Understanding how to write SQL queries to manipulate and extract the data in a systematic way is key to transforming raw data into actionable information. Therefore, those with a technical background can start working at the help desk at a hospital or healthcare organization to increase their clinical knowledge and get a sense of the questions clinical users have. The technical skills that they possess can be an advantage when transitioning into a career in Health Informatics.
   
   
5. Interpersonal skills
   
   Interpersonal skills are important when working in the field of Health Informatics. As I stated previously, working in this field can entail working with those from the clinical side (i.e. midwives, nurses, physicians) and those from the technical side (i.e. business analysts, software developers). Therefore, it’s important that you can speak the language of both sides and show a willingness to address their concerns. If your previous job experience had you working in a managerial role or you regularly worked with different departments (i.e. Finance vs. HR), then these skills will be beneficial when transitioning into a career in Health Informatics.
   
   This has been a breakdown of the 5 transferrable skills you can use from previous work experience to transition into a career in Health Informatics. Remember, sometimes you don’t have to start from scratch! The valuable work you have done prior to can be used to transition into this field.
   
   Comment down below, what transferrable skills do you possess?