Looking for a career change as a clinician? I often see this question, how do I transition into an IT role from my clinical role (e.g. nurse, pharmacy technician)?
In this blog post, I am going to go over tips to transition from a clinical role to a health informatics role within your organization.
1. Have conversations
The first tip is to begin having conversations with folks in IT. Being already part of the organization is such an advantage over those who don’t have any ties to your workplace. My first tip would be to try and contact someone in your IT department or attend company-wide meetings that your organization is hosting, to get to know people in different departments. By reaching out to your colleagues in IT, you can get a sense of what qualifications or skills someone generally has. For instance, you might find out that people generally have knowledge of writing queries using SQL or they might have experience working with data visualization tools, such as Tableau or Qlik. 
Credits
2. Start self-learning
Having knowledge of these skills is a good place to begin your self-learning journey, as many of these tools are available for free or have a trial period so you can start to improve your technical skills. This will prepare you for future interview questions where you can talk about how you used these tools for your own personal projects (e.g. a clinical business intelligence portfolio, more on that here). In addition, once you develop connections with individuals in IT or the Clinical Decision Support department you might be able to job shadow, to get a sense of potential tasks that you might be expected to do and if they are of any interest to you. Sometimes there can be a disconnect between what we think a job entails and what it actually entails, therefore, it’s important to clarify right away if a role in health informatics is for you, before you find yourself in this position.
New to the field of health informatics? Get this free guide to getting your first job in Health Informatics!
3. Take initiative
Another tip to transitioning into a health informatics role within your organization is to take on extra projects of your own initiative. I recently had a chance to interview Jennifer Lewis, who works in nursing informatics (you can listen to the interview here), she also has an amazing YouTube channel with a wealth of information on both nursing and health informatics. She said that when she started in nursing she noticed that there was a gap in the communication of what tasks were completed between the day and night shift nurses.
On her own initiative, she collaborated with her nursing team and built check-off forms which was a huge time saver on the nursing floor. Consequently, this is something that she brought up when she was interviewing for a nursing informatics role, the value she added to her organization through designing a product of her own accord. Designing and finding ways to make your clinical job easier through the use of technology, is a great way to practice working in a role in health informatics. Look at the daily tasks you do, record them and find ways to automate or reduce the barriers to friction it takes to execute them.
4. Become a Superuser
You can also attempt to become a superuser within your organization. Being a superuser can look like you being trained on your EHR system, through specialized workshops run through vendors and access to extensive documentation. Having this specialized knowledge about the EHR and being the “go-to” person is such a valuable skill because you will have a unique perspective on how to improve the system and this could lead to you working in a health informatics role with an EHR vendor, such as Epic or Cerner.
The clinical knowledge that you have is valuable and makes you a prime candidate to transition into a role in health informatics by expanding your network through volunteering, becoming a superuser and taking initiative on projects to reduce inefficiencies within your department! 
Comment down below, how did YOU transition into the field of health informatics as a clinician?
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