Top Tools Health Informatic Professionals Use

I polled a group of health informatic professionals to learn what tools they use daily in their jobs. The results were surprisingly common across the board! The common tools used by health informatic professionals are:

For acquiring data and writing queries
🏆 WINNER: SQL

SQL is a structured query language which is used to “communicate” with different tables within your database. For instance I could have one table which contains patient demographic information such as age, gender and a primary identifier which could be the patient’s health card number. I could have another table which houses the patient’s health condition. In order to join these two tables together for further analysis, I can write a query using SQL language to carry out this task.

For data analysis and modeling
🏆 WINNERS: R or Python

R and Python are open source tools which contain powerful libraries and packages which can be used to clean unstructured data and apply descriptive statistics to your data to uncover interesting healthcare trends.

For data visualization
🏆 WINNERS: Power BI, Qlik or Tableau

Once you have pulled pertinent data, cleaned and performed analysis on your data you might want to display it through charts and graphs, to present it in a way which is understandable to a wide audience. Your presentation of your data to clinicians can be transformed from just simple charts in Excel to interactive graphs that have superior filtering capabilities using Power BI, Qlik or Tableau.

For project management tasks
🏆 WINNERS: Smartsheet, Excel or Microsoft Planner

Planning for meetings, to ensure that folks from both the clinical and technical side are on the same page, is often a big part of the job of a health informatics professional. Using tools such as Smartsheet, Excel and Microsoft Planner are great tools to remain organized and share quick insights between departments, to ensure projects are meeting deadlines and scope-creep is reduced.

Are you surprised by these responses? Comment down below, what tools do you use regularly in your job?