CuriousPharmD said:
someone who has Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Management Information Systems and Finance. I also have about 3-4 years of IT support work experience. I will be getting my PharmD in 2008 and wanted to know what types of jobs are there for pharmacists where I can utilize my IT and finance backgrounds as well. Thanks.....
Well, I don't know when the whole pharmacy shortage is supposed to end, but I think it will still vary a little depending on what region you live in when trying to find various jobs. But I would think you would have a a pretty good job outlook.. Many people w/ IT experience end up being on the administrative side of pharmacy developing programs for the pharmacy database to perform various functions: expediting order entry, programming order sheets into database, creating programs to use the database to extract pt data for internal reviews or research, etc.
The possibilities w/ your experience may simply only be limited by your creativity. Many of the "computer people" in pharmacy are either self taught or like you had bachelors or even masters training. Basically the umbrella market term I guess would be pharmacy informatics and think they actually have a site called
www.pharmacyinformatics.com, but also check out the following as a potential job oppurtunity:
http://www.ohsu.edu/hr/it_rx.html.
Either way the means by which you apply your skills will be up to you, so if either of these above posting don't point you in the right direction I wouldn't be deterred. Just about every healthcare system is always looking for people w/ computer training to make the pharmacy and medical databases more interactive, user friendly, and beneficial as a means for outcome data so I'd figure you could find a niche anywhere; however it just might take a yr or two trying to figure where that niche is. Your finance experience would also serve as an extra benefit when trying to do cost effective analysis. FYI...the pay for computer pharmacy specialists is typically very competitive w/ everyone else and often also pays a little better than the avg staff as the position is considered in the middle management area. I'd also check out any of the following:
www.usajobs.gov,
www.vacareers.va.gov,
www.kaiserpermanente.org (check spelling on this one),
www.aphanet.org,
www.amcp.org.
I remember in the VA they were always looking for pharmacy computer people to help interface pharmacy database (DHCP) w/ computerized patient record system (CPRS). Since all other hospitals are also somewhere in that whole transition process of computerized pt data and outcomes monitoring, it will just be up to you to find which setting fits your wishes.
