This new job category is predicted to grow by 21% in 2020, according to the U.S. Labor statistics, with new titles ranging from Clinical Informaticist to IT Project Managers to Informatics Consultants. The demand to hire healthcare professionals with experience in data analysis, compilation, and visualization has never been more essential to support patient care. The job of a health informatics specialist is to ensure patient data is accurate, complete, and readily available to healthcare professionals that use this data to diagnosis and care for the patient. Informaticists are savvy at characterizing, evaluating large amounts of data, and refining the data into improved clinical processes or practices.

The emergence of this sub-specialty within the healthcare field is exploding as healthcare organizations, and vendors clamor to understand the data that they produce. Big data, lots of data, asynchronous data – it all needs to be amassed and transformed into something that makes sense. The healthcare informaticist is the one tasked with taking this discordant data and aggregating it down into manageable data sets to improve patient care.

Impact you.
Your challenge is to promote your knowledge of the clinical world using technology. The responsibility lies with the laboratory, not IT, to lead the search for new and innovative IT problem solving and technologies that support the value of clinical information and better patient care.

Wow – Does this sound familiar?

Medical technologists are also healthcare informaticists! We would argue they are the oldest and original clinical informaticists. Just as laboratory testing is comprised of > 70% of the medical data record, medical technologists play a major role in the information analysis of that data: they review results from analyzers, make decisions whether to approve or further investigate patient results, graphically interpret and compare results from a wide range of sophisticated instrumentation. Medical technologists are trained to recognize patient result abnormalities within and across clinical disciplines, characterize data within clinical specimens, identify discrepancies in data sets, and they know how to assess and take action when instrumentation is out of statistical control. Medical technologists can digest large amounts of data in a restricted time frame and are quick to correct issues and track down issues better than any true detective. A medical technologist is ‘the original’ informaticist, the purveyor of clinical data analysis, and the champion of evaluating and qualifying patient data.

So, what is the point?

Use your ‘informaticist’ skills to advance your position in the lab, your healthcare organization, or take flight to launch a new career. Medical technologist skills are in demand as they translate perfectly to evaluating, qualifying, and simplifying the data using complex technology. Increase your value to the healthcare chain by applying your expertise to data analytics. After all, you are ‘the original’ before it was in style to be called a healthcare informaticist.

Inspire you.

Get involved in your laboratory to identify and seek out new technologies that not only streamline or improve laboratory operations but also provide new ways to share or display clinical data across your healthcare organization. Your feedback and championing of new technology that fosters laboratory informatics is vital to push the laboratory forward as a valued partner in the healthcare continuum.