Working in Healthcare Industry

MAPL

For those working in the industry, do you have any tips on how to break into healthcare IT? Most jobs I've seen require you to have clinical experience despite the job description having primarily IT duties. Working in healthcare has always been a goal of mine, so any advice would be truly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

jmasterj206

There really isn't a huge difference in healthcare than any other IT job. You are already familiar with HIPAA with your HIT certification. Some of the jobs that support the clinical software are required to be medical people since they understand drugs, allergies, etc. There are a lot of EMR vendors like Epic, Meditech, McKesson, CPSI, and Allscripts, but I really only support the backend of that and really have no interaction with doctors or nurses. Probably shoot for getting your foot in the door with a help desk or desktop support job and you will be exposed to the rest.

galed

I work in a hospital doing Desktop Support. Doing networking/server/desktop you won't need any experience with healthcare just familiarity with HIPAA. Our clinical apps team mostly used to be nurses. They usually have little technical knowledge which is a huge frustration for us but they mainly work with vendors such as the ones mentioned in the above post.

xenodamus

More of the same advice here. On the support/infrastructure side, previous healthcare experience is less important. Jobs that require clinical experience are usually supporting the EMR system alone and interface heavily with doctors and nurses. Once you get your foot in the door via helpdesk or desktop support other opportunities will present themselves. From there you can advance to network/system administration, security, or application focused roles.

WiseWun

Look up HL7, that skill is in demand in the healthcare industry. It's more to towards Analyst/Programming.

MAPL

Thanks for the advice everyone. I did a six month training program for EHR implementation and I'm having a hard time landing a gig working with EHRs without clinical experience. Thus, I thought all IT positions within the industry required clinical experience. Guess I was wrong.

the_Grinch

I agree not all IT positions within the hospital require clinical experience. But in the event it does, why not become an EMT-B? That will give you a very good amount of medical knowledge and if you volunteer somewhere you get some "clinical" experience as it were.

coty24

Wow..... It was like that where I worked as well, I was like how are you doing "clin apps" with no IT skill? Apparently it's like that across the board.

coreyb80

I would love to land my first Helpdesk gig in the Healthcare industry.

Bokeh

Not all healthcare jobs are in hospitals. I have seen several in the dental as well as medical practice (ie doctor offices) that do have an IT support staff. I myself work for a hearing device company, and we all went through basic HIPAA training. Keep your eyes open for other healthcare opportunities.

Everyone

When I worked at a hospital, IT was split into different sections. Those with clinical experience were "Analysts", I'm still not sure what is they did all day, seemed pretty useless to me. :P All kidding aside, they worked on things that others have already mentioned... McKesson and Epic software, HL7 interfaces... other medical apps, but mostly configuring them so the doctors and nurses could use them.

The support/engineering side of the house maintained the network and servers, and did not have clinical experience. So that is all the infrastructure, routers, switches, AD, Exchange, SQL, Oracle, general *nix and Windows server stuff, etc. Also often responsible for installation of the medical software, and troubleshooting it if the "Analysts" couldn't figure it out.

Healthcare was my least favorite industry to work in.

gbdavidx

I work for a major hospital in northern california on the service desk, we do a lot of "restarting/resetting"

I'm trying to get into the TOC side or account admin (creating accounts), we also have integration analysts as mentioned above, level1 don't need hl7 but its recommended

minit

Think long and hard before thinking about getting into healthcare IT. I've been doing it for the past 6 years. Outside of the banking industry you will not find a more pressure packed industry to work in. Sure, pc's, servers, and switches all need to work for any business to run. But, it goes to another level when it effects patient care. Not only do we have many "mission critical" servers like everyone else, but also dozens of "mission critical" pc's that cannot be down under any circumstance for more then 30 minutes during business hours. If they are down for a long period its a huge problem. There maybe a cancer patient sitting in the waiting room waiting for test results, etc, you get the idea.

Doctors can also be extremely difficult to work with. Troubleshooting on their pc's almost always has to be done after hours. They also get so pissed off sometimes they break phones etc.

With all that said, it does pay well, and benefits are good. But, be prepared to have a thick skin.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck.

M