4 Jobs that Can Transition Into a Health Informatics Role

Sometimes we are looking for a mid-career shift or we feel burnt out at our current role and we are looking for a pivot. If you have clinical experience and are looking to be involved more heavily in the technology aspect of running a healthcare organization, a health informatics role might be of interest to you. Similarly, if you have experience on the IT side of healthcare organizations and want to work more behind the scenes with analytics or data engineering, a health informatics position might be the answer. Without further ado, here are some roles that can be a basis for transitioning into a health informatics role.

Nurse/Pharmacy Technician: Clinicians working in patient-facing roles and who have a clear understanding of clinical workflows are a great fit when it comes to transitioning to a health informatics position. My advice would be to become a super-user of the healthcare system that is used on-site, whether it is Epic, Cerner, etc… If you become the “go-to” person this could put you in a great position when it comes to advocating for a career shift. Check out my interview here with Jennifer Lewis MSN-NI, BSN, RN who works as a Senior Nurse Manager in Nursing Informatics. Jennifer started out as a nurse and quickly established herself as the “go-to” tech person. She made sure to highlight the positive changes she had made on the floor, during her informatics interview.





Help Desk Support (in a healthcare organization): Working at a help desk job allows you to gain experience communicating with individuals from a variety of backgrounds from hospital staff, clinicians, and volunteers. These are invaluable skills and are at the heart of any health informatics role, to be able to communicate technical concepts to non-technical audiences. In addition, a help desk role can help you to become VERY familiar with the hardware and software used at the hospital, as you will be troubleshooting a variety of user issues.


Clinical Research Assistant: Working as a research assistant is another great role that can help you transition into a health informatics role. This is also a great opportunity because there are research assistant positions that are entry-level and this can help you get your foot in the door, to working in a hospital. Sometimes hospitals can prefer to hire people who have ties to their organization, so starting as a research assistant is a good first step. As a research assistant, you can develop your analytical skills and start to be well versed in tools such as R, Python, Tableau, C++, etc…


Project Manager/Business Analyst: One of the things which surprised me about working in a health informatics role was the parallels in job duties with the project manager and the business analyst. Oftentimes the health informatics role will consist of working on several mini-projects, whether it’s building a dashboard or report, this will require you to meet with external stakeholders and outline key requirements prior to building anything. If you need tips on outlining these key requirements, I have a blog post here which goes in-depth. Having these skills in your arsenal, which project managers and business analysts use regularly, are great ways to transition into a health informatics role.

I hope these 4 job titles gives you insight into possible careers you could apply to TODAY to get experience and move into the next phase of your health informatics journey, comment down below, have you worked in any of these roles? Did they help you learn the skills needed in your health informatics role?