Richard Lowery ⋅ Clarksville, TN U.S. Army, Sergeant First Class ⋅ 13 years served

Jodie,

Thank you so much for the vast amount of information that you wrote here. It will probably take a little bit to get all you stated put into some type of search plan. I actually feel bad because of not having more to say. Outstanding information!!

Richard

Jodie Prieto-Rodriguez ⋅ Pittsburgh, PA Allegheny Health Network- Highmark Health ⋅ 21 years experience

Good Afternoon Richard:

Many IT professionals have the same difficulty in breaking away long enough from work to set themselves up for a career transition. The decentralized mobile nature of the work is a blessing and a curse I suppose.

I have worked with many Network IT leads and have noted that they network the most is at certification classes, conferences, and organization training days. Outside of School and work it is rather difficult to search face-to-face.

I recommend doing searches for "healthcare informatics" on Hospital system websites; USA Jobs, clearance jobs.net, linkedin, ziprecruiter, and indeed. The Army Reserve noted a need for an IT profession specific to healthcare and created an officer career path that commissions as a 2nd LT (with enlisted time served for pay credit). The Job is coded as a "70D".

Small health care organizations usually contract out their IT work. Medium to large systems may or may not contract. The largest organizations usually keep their own team on 24/7 operations and will have contractors "vendors" for their e-health records, specialty test IOT compatibility, and/or special projects.

I would suggest applying directly to the organization through their website careers link, social network such as linked in, or employment aggregator such as indeed.com e.g.

https://www.indeed.com/q-Clinical-Informatics-jobs.html

I've been working healthcare in various forms for over 20 years. Healthcare is big on certifications, degrees, and experience. The criteria for most employment is a degree and license (Nurse, Doc, tech, etc...), and as such... networking only goes so far. Web job application and face-to-face meetings go farther and produce greater results.

You may be interested in healthcare records e-systems development and management. Companies like Epic, Cerner, MHS, salesforce, MHS Genesis, etc... these systems present a great opportunity for development as they are becoming more and more prevalent and required by new and renovated healthcare systems by law.

I hope the advice helps. please feel free to DM me, thank you.