A little about me:
Currently, I work in Healthcare Informatics for an American company and am based in the United Kingdom. A little about me: I graduated in 1997 and had worked as a travel nurse for several years. In 2012, I met my husband and decided to move to Australia to be with him, so I applied for my nursing license through APHRA. After getting registered, I quickly found a job at a newly opened Private Hospital in Sydney.
Why Informatics
In July 2014, I returned from my honeymoon to find my Nursing Unit Manager had assigned me to Superuser training for our new EMR conversion. Due to my background as a travel nurse and many EMR conversions, I spent 1:1 time with an Application Specialist to create the new ICU Flowsheet. Although it may have been tedious to review every observation item in Critical Care, it was also gratifying when we went live with an awesome Flowsheet. After six months in the superuser role, I was asked to be Hospital Project Coordinator for the EMR implementation.
The project was going into its fifth year and was stalling. The Senior management wanted the project to progress. I have seconded to my ICU position, and the hospital Go Live occurred five months later. Shortly after the successful Go Live, my husband and I moved to Amsterdam for his job. During our year in The Netherlands, I started the interview process with my current company.
My company has specifically hired clinical staff for Application Analyst positions. It is necessary to understand the workflow that clinic staff is using to recreate the errors being seen. A good clinical understanding of how the product should function and troubleshoot when it doesn’t function as expected is necessary for this role.
What do I actually do as an Applicant Analyst?
I work Monday through Friday from 09:00 to 5:30. Occasionally, I travel to customer sites, but it’s much less than my implementation colleagues as I work in Product Support. My daily work involves; picking up tickets from our queue, recreating workflows to test errors, testing new development that will be deployed into the products, creating JIRA tickets for bugs and new development, investigating errors that arise for the customer, conducting meetings with customers, engaging with colleagues from all over the world, and dealing with high-stress situations.
Skills are required for this role
Varied skills are required for this role in informatics. Leadership is necessary as well as management skills as often the customer may be difficult or frustrated. Working as a nurse for too many years to count, I have developed my own management skills and have helped resolve issues instead of escalating the situation.
System analysis is critical to this role. I assess how users interact with the EMR by examining the workflow and input of data and the output of information. Is the process working as expected? Is the problem a bug, or is it working as designed? As well as collaborating with implementation to ensure the EMR functions more efficiently for the organization and clinical staff. Data Protection and Compliance are vital to this role.
Yearly, I must complete Data Protection Education to ensure the patient’s record remains confidential. Often, we work over VPN and use remote desktops. We may not receive patient data via email, and tickets may not include any vulnerable information related to the patient. Often, an organization sends information via a Minimum Dataset Form, detailing the issue found. I use these details to try and work out the problem.
How my nursing background helps
Coordination, facilitation, and integration; I am the Middle Man. I can translate our technical specialists’ complicated language into easy to understand clinical terms or basic computer language. Also, I can discuss what might be happening on the back-end of the EMR with the clinical staff and make it more relatable. We use an integrated platform for one of our Healthcare tools. There is also coordination of Go-Live activities and project management skills required.
I must facilitate monthly reports and weekly internal and external meetings with other departments in our organization or with customers. Go Live activities must be coordinated well so that everything that needs to happen will happen. Travel, hotels, phones, schedules, and VPN/EMR accounts must be organized so that we aren’t struggling at the last moment with these tasks.
Recently, I’ve transferred from the Windsor office to the Edinburgh office. Since I’ve moved to Scotland, I’m travelling a bit more for my role.
Overall, working in informatics requires a very similar skill set as nursing. I love my role and my job.
