WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Clinical Informatics Skills
Clinical Informatics Skills
With the constant evolution of the healthcare landscape, technology continues to play an increasingly important role. Clinical informatics, also known as health informatics, is the fusion of technology and clinical medicine that empowers healthcare professionals to integrate technology within clinical practice by ensuring that accurate and up-to-date patient information is available.
Clinical informatics skills help professionals promote the proper utilization of resources by streamlining workflows and allowing data exchange across various departments. These skills open the door to many career options across the healthcare industry, including leadership roles in which you can implement technologies into healthcare institutions.
This guide explores clinical informatics skills, their importance, and how they can benefit your career journey.
What Are Clinical Informatics Skills?
Clinical informatics skills are a set of capabilities required for healthcare professionals who use technology to improve patient care, clinical outcomes, and decision-making.
These skills include the ability to integrate healthcare and IT expertise. They entail understanding healthcare processes and using IT tools like electronic health records to analyze clinical data and effectively communicate with diverse stakeholders.
Why Are Clinical Informatics Skills Important?
Clinical informatics skills help optimize storing, retrieving, and usage of healthcare information. The skills bridge the gap between healthcare services and technology.
A proficiency in clinical informatics skills will allow you to:
- Make informed care decisions: Clinical healthcare professionals access patient data such as lab results, allergies, or medical history and make informed decisions for treatment plans, tests, and prescriptions.
- Implement and manage EHR: Electronic health records (EHR) store patient data such as medication, test results, and treatment history. You’ll understand how to successfully implement an EHR system within your healthcare organization. You can choose the right EHR system and customize and configure the system to align with your organization’s clinical needs.
- Manage population health: Healthcare organizations can retrieve and analyze data from EHR systems and identify disease patterns and risk factors among populations. The results can be used to develop intervention and preventative measures to improve public health.
- Integrate telemedicine: You’ll be able to integrate technology into existing patient healthcare systems. Telemedicine allows patients in underserved communities to access healthcare remotely.
- Implement telemedicine technologies: By successfully incorporating telemedicine by selecting the right telehealth technology, you’ll be equipped to implement the workflow design and provide remote, patient-centered care. Telemedicine technologies allow virtual consultations, patient education, and virtual sign tracking.
What Are the Benefits of Having Clinical Informatics Skills?
Clinical informatics skills empower you to contribute to meaningful technological innovations and improve patient experience, creating a better overall healthcare outcome. The skills can also open numerous career opportunities.
Here, we’ll explore the benefits of developing and honing clinical informatics skills:
- Specialized roles: You can work in various specialty roles across the healthcare sector. For example, you can work with insurance companies, research labs, public health agencies, medical facilities, etc.
- Competitive advantage: Due to the rapid growth of data generation in healthcare, there is more demand for clinical informatics specialists. Clinical informatics skills give you diverse expertise in both healthcare and technology, offering you a competitive advantage, especially for roles that require adaptability and problem-solving.
- Medical research opportunities: As a clinical informaticist, you’ll have opportunities to collect and analyze data to identify patterns and potential for medical advancements.
- Nursing informatics: If you’re a nurse, nursing informatics skills will empower you to optimize your nursing roles and improve patient care, which will open up leadership roles and opportunities for career advancement.
- Academic and training roles: In a training role, you could teach healthcare staff about how to use interfaces. With this experience, you can advance to become a health information technology trainer and train the next generation of clinical informaticists.
- Consulting and advisory roles: As you gain more expertise in clinical informatics, you can become a consultant for medical centers, research labs, or other organizations seeking to organize and optimize healthcare data systems.
Examples of Clinical Informatics Skills in the Workplace
Clinical informatics skills are critical in improving patient outcomes by implementing technology in healthcare. The skills are applied daily in various healthcare settings to educate healthcare professionals, optimize clinical workflows, reporting, and much more.
Let’s look at some practical examples of how you can use clinical informatics skills in the workplace.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) Management
Clinical informatics specialists use their expertise to design user-friendly systems to manage EHR. They ensure the systems are safely integrated and the regulatory standards are adhered to.
Remote Patient Monitoring and Virtual Consultations
In underserved and rural communities, clinical informatics helps implement the virtual monitoring of patient vital signs and remote consultations through video conferencing.
Design and Implement Clinical Decision Support Systems
Clinical decision support systems use data to provide health professionals with reminders, recommendations, or alerts. Clinical informatics skills help design and implement these systems, improving patient outcomes and optimizing health professionals’ workflows.
Data-Driven Insights to Improve Care Outcomes
Health professionals use clinical informatics systems to analyze patient data. They can make data-driven decisions to improve patient care and health outcomes.
Personal Health Monitoring
Devices that help monitor and manage various health conditions such as low or high blood pressure, abnormal heart rate or blood sugar levels, and more are developed by clinical informatics specialists.
Medication Management
Clinical informatics specialists use their skills to design medication management systems, including identifying triggers and ensuring that the correct medication is given to patients.
Health Literacy
Patient education materials are essential in public health. These materials help patients understand different conditions, preventative measures, and lifestyle changes that could help manage their health conditions. Individuals with clinical informatics skills design user-friendly content that educates patients to better understand and manage their health.
How Can I Use Clinical Informatics Skills?
You can use clinical informatics skills in various roles across the healthcare industry. From diverse career pathways to EHR implementation and telemedicine, health informatics can be beneficial to your healthcare profession.
- Management of health records: EHR analysts can maintain and optimize systems to keep health records accurate and secure. They'll work closely with the IT team to install and configure the EHR system allowing seamless data exchange between different systems and healthcare professionals.
- Medical billing: Medical billers and coderscan use clinical informatics skills to analyze patient information and submit it as a code to the insurance company for reimbursement.
- Train healthcare staff on how to use health information systems: Health information management (HIM) educators can train staff in the healthcare industry to implement interfaces, devices, or processes. They'll teach healthcare professionals to collect, organize, and store patient data safely.
- Identify and fix inefficiencies: You can analyze the data collected to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. As a clinical informatics manager, you will leverage this information to develop solutions to improve health service delivery.
- Integrate new technologies in the healthcare environment: Chief nursing informatics officers will stay up to date with the latest technology in healthcare. They will use their skills to introduce new technology into an organization, and train staff on how to use it safely.
How Can I Learn Clinical Informatics Skills?
As a clinical informatics specialist, you will manage and analyze data to improve the quality of patient care. To learn clinical informatics skills, you must have a medical background, which might include a bachelor’s degree in nursing, pharmacy, medicine, or other related fields.
WGU offers several MSN programs that develop and enhance your clinical informatics skills such as an M.S. in Nursing Informatics.
With our healthcare-related degree programs, you will learn to:
- Modify technology systems to analyze care outcomes.
- Visualize results of data analyses.
- Create a system development plan that defines development life cycle activities.
- Examine the effect of legal and regulatory processes on nursing practice, healthcare delivery, and outcomes.
- Create a system development plan that defines development life cycle activities.
- Modify technology systems to analyze care outcomes.
- Conduct patient-centered, culturally competent and responsive strategies.
- Leverage technologies to improve health, healthcare equity, safety, quality, and outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Clinical informatics specialists help integrate technology into healthcare. Their responsibilities include:
- Developing and managing EHR systems.
- Implementing technology for telemedicine and remote patient monitoring.
- Analyzing healthcare data to identify health trends among populations.
- Using data to devise processes for improvement.
- Providing training and guidance to healthcare staff.
- Ensuring healthcare data security and regulatory compliance.
To develop your clinical informatics skills, you must first obtain a degree in nursing informatics, health information management, or a related field. You must then gain hands-on experience through internship or entry-level clinical informatics positions in the healthcare industry.
You can get leadership positions in healthcare institutions, research opportunities, and education roles where you can train others on healthcare technology. There are endless opportunities for career advancements for nursing and pharmacy informatics professionals.
In personalized medicine and treatment planning, clinical informatics helps collect and analyze patient data to identify genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors contributing to better health for individuals.
Through patient data, doctors and other healthcare staff can devise treatment plans and target accurate medications.
WGU offers various degree programs in nursing Informatics and health information management.
You can also learn clinical informatics on online platforms and courses like Udemy, LinkedIn Learning and edx. Professional organizations such as the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) also provide learning and networking opportunities.
