There are a lot of jobs becoming more and more popular within the healthcare field today, but one area where travel nurses might want to focus on in particular is healthcare informatics. As millennials enter the workforce, a focus on tech in healthcare has become more prevalent. Because so many of these individuals have grown accustomed to tech solutions in their day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise that healthcare informatics is becoming a growing job field.
Healthcare informatics at a glance
Any system that is used to document patient data is considered part of the health informatics industry. Many of these are driven by electronic health records and health information exchange guidelines. However, there is an analytical side to this industry as well.
Tech advancements in healthcare are nothing new, but as EHRs and other medical software become more sophisticated, there is a need to connect patients, other medical personnel and administrative professionals in the healthcare field under these healthcare informatics guidelines. Healthcare informatics is rooted in data, but it also connects all of the branches of healthcare together, including clinical, financial and technological tasks.
According to the American Health Information Management Association, “health information management and technology are among the fastest growing of any market sector.” There are many changes happening in healthcare that are influencing this rapid job growth, including the U.S. healthcare structure as well as regulatory changes.
What’s driving healthcare informatics?
EHRs and HIE standards have been operating in the healthcare field for some time, as you know as a travel nurse. However, in the past five years since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, there has been a renewed focus on using tech tools to modernize the U.S. healthcare system, improve patient care and bolster preventative disease efforts.
One of the biggest government investments into this change was the meaningful use program, a timeline set up by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that funneled billions of dollars to healthcare providers so that they could install new EHR systems or upgrade existing EHR platforms. However, there are several benchmarks, or “stages,” that the CMS requires to participate in the program, otherwise the CMS issues penalties. Because administrators at hospitals, practices and other providers want to remain financially solvent and avoid these fees, many medical professionals have turned to healthcare informatics professionals in order gain insight and clinical knowledge.
As such, there has been a lot of interest in healthcare informatics jobs lately, and the market trends aren’t expected to slow down anytime soon.
“This field is exploding,” Charles Friedman, director of the health informatics program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, which enrolled its first master’s class in the fall of 2012, explained to U.S. News & World Report. “Access to health information on the Web is taking off at a meteoric pace. It’s creating enormous employment opportunities.”
Healthcare informatics allows professionals to become well-versed in clinical and health IT tasks.In addition to UM, many universities across the U.S., including the University of Illinois-Chicago and Northwestern University, are offering similar graduate programs for students so that they can expand their knowledge of both clinical tasks and health IT.
Doctors enjoy having a clinical documentation specialist because they can gain expertise on health IT issues at the point of care from a seasoned professional. This allows physicians to take the guesswork out of regulatory mandates and compliance so that they can instead focus on patient engagement and care.
Preventative care is another major part of this job, so data analytics knowledge is a must. With an advanced degree, these individuals can crunch the numbers at an organization so that they are better prepared to handle complex health episodes.
“If I know that my visit rate of patients with common cold symptoms is doubling and it’s October, I’m going to be able to predict from that what the rate of actual influenza is, and the implications that will have on the number of in-patient admissions,” C. Martin Harris, CIO at the Cleveland Clinic, explained to U.S. News.
Healthcare informatics is one of the fastest-growing fields in any job market.What does a healthcare informatics job look like?
Healthcare informatics is becoming more and more integrated into the overall clinical environment, so the role of a healthcare informatics expert touches many different aspects of care. For instance, clinical documentation specialists might have to take on:
- Becoming responsible for medical record reviews.
- Training healthcare staff on what to look for in an optimized EHR, as well as training IT staff on clinical issues.
- Obtaining clinical documentation and then securely and safely storing this data through electronic means.
- Identifying gaps in patient EHRs that could potentially influence a patient’s illness severity, duplicate services, medication use and mortality risk.
- Staying up to date on health-related regulatory changes on the state and federal levels.
It goes without saying that a clinical documentation specialist will need to be experienced in handling health IT, whether EHRs and HIE is documented on in-house servers or in the cloud.
Though healthcare informatics might not be for every travel nursing professional, it’s a very in-demand field that could help bolster your success in healthcare and grow your professional expertise across the medical spectrum.