Any Informatics Pharmacists out there??

[lord999]

It's been an NIH Fellowship (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/ep/GrantTrainInstitute.html) for far longer and is still considered a more respected credential than the residency for industry purposes. Most of the ASAP attendees have that kind of a background. Pharmacy informatics residencies have a tendency to teach one how to be an EHR-branded pharmacist without the skills necessary to deal with more general situations or deal with analytics/regulatory reporting.

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[gwarm01]

Anyone have experience working with Cerner? I'm wondering how it compares to Meditech or Epic. With Cerner's big win of the DoD contract there will probably be a lot of solid work available in that ecosystem in the coming years. These are mad times, after all, and one can't help but think about their future.

How about transitioning from one EHR to another? Like lord999 mentioned above, a lot of us get trained in one ecosystem and might not have the skills to deal with things as intuitively as someone with a deeper understanding. I'm sure that I'm solidly in that camp. I went from Meditech to Epic, but if I'm being honest, my Meditech experience left a lot to be desired.

 

[will7678]

I would love to move into pharmacy informatics in the future. Any advice on what I can learn on my own time to make myself a good fit for this position? My background is currently about 2.5 years as an overnight hospital pharmacist, 7 years as an ICU nurse prior to that. I am comfortable with computers but not great. I can build a computer but couldn't do anything on the programming end more in depth than writing a few lines of code in python. In other words I could write something in an IDE that would run through a function or two but nothing past that level.

 

[gwarm01]

I would love to move into pharmacy informatics in the future. Any advice on what I can learn on my own time to make myself a good fit for this position? My background is currently about 2.5 years as an overnight hospital pharmacist, 7 years as an ICU nurse prior to that. I am comfortable with computers but not great. I can build a computer but couldn't do anything on the programming end more in depth than writing a few lines of code in python. In other words I could write something in an IDE that would run through a function or two but nothing past that level.

My path was to just volunteer for any sort of tech related project that I could. Become a superuser if your institution is implementing new pharmacy hardware/software, try to become a Pyxis admin, really anything. Then I started a nationwide search,
which is almost required unless you get really lucky and a spot happens to open up in your area. You bring your clinical and operational knowledge to the table more than any sort of programming in my experience.