naive, new IT pharmacist looking for guidance on future career

[fistbumpsgalore]

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After working a clinical/staff hospital job for roughly 2 years out of school, I have accepted an offer as a epic willow analyst. i plan to use this opportunity to hone my project management and clinical informatics skills. Once I have the foundations of the epic work down, I plan to start a Udemy course on data science (stats, python, data visualization, machine learning, etc.). I've been reading around and others state that learning SAS, SQL, and tableau would also be helpful as well? I don't foresee myself being a clinical applications analyst for the remainder of my career. To be honest I don't know exactly where to go from clinical informatics, but i know it involves drugs/pharmacy, technology, and more importantly, bigger picture strategic work. Any guidance on what I should and shouldn't be focusing on? thank you

 

[gwarm01]

We're you hired to implement Epic or to work on an existing system?

Enjoy your time at their campus. It's a lot of fun to explore. I can't really give you much advice, as I'm only a few years ahead of you on the same journey.

 

[lord999]

Whoa, slow down a bit. How about getting good at requirements analysis, database design, and basic workflow engineering to start? That will get you through Year 1. Then, ask where. I usually advise knowledge on Intersystems Cache and their form of globals called classes if you want to develop, a statistical language and SQL if you want to deal with analysis, and either the NIH or medical school if you want to lead. In all cases, having knowledge of interface development and protocol messaging helps with external system issues.

But at this point, focus on what is in front of you.

 

[alpha12]

After working a clinical/staff hospital job for roughly 2 years out of school, I have accepted an offer as a epic willow analyst. i plan to use this opportunity to hone my project management and clinical informatics skills. Once I have the foundations of the epic work down, I plan to start a Udemy course on data science (stats, python, data visualization, machine learning, etc.). I've been reading around and others state that learning SAS, SQL, and tableau would also be helpful as well? I don't foresee myself being a clinical applications analyst for the remainder of my career. To be honest I don't know exactly where to go from clinical informatics, but i know it involves drugs/pharmacy, technology, and more importantly, bigger picture strategic work. Any guidance on what I should and shouldn't be focusing on? thank you

Don't you need a statistics background for SAS?

 

[lord999]

Don't you need a statistics background for SAS?

Not a mathematical one. You can get by just fine with applied statistics for SAS, no real analysis or measure theory necessary. If you do get measure theory as one of your classes and can deal with distribution theory as a derivative issue, you are almost always better off with R/S-Plus or FORTRAN anyway.

For most health outcomes, you can get away with a program that uses RAM for the datasets (arrays), so R and Stata are reasonable. S-Plus or MatLab are probably what you are going to need for most bench work, but are fairly easy computer algebra systems to pick up (and S-Plus and R are dialects of each other for the statistical portion).

I recommend SAS if your datasets are incredibly large (>2 TB or larger), because most of the other languages require RAM-based storage for the datasets and the SAS Program Data Vector can be set to processor-based for dataset processing. If your datasets are 8 TB or larger, FORTRAN in node computation is still the way to go, though very few pharmaceutical datasets go anywhere near that large. I haven't used FORTRAN in a distributed computing 12 years, because scientific computation outside high dimensional arrays is practical on commodity hardware. Only people that I see using distributed computing on a regular basis are the bioinformaticists and cheminformatics groups.

 

[WVUPharm2007]

If you have any talent at all, can you go work for CVS, fix myschedule, and get me a reasonable amount of tech help?

 

[fistbumpsgalore]

We're you hired to implement Epic or to work on an existing system?

Enjoy your time at their campus. It's a lot of fun to explore. I can't really give you much advice, as I'm only a few years ahead of you on the same journey.

going to do work on an existing system. we've spoken before on reddit, just using a different username. lol. do you recommend bringing a laptop or a note pad for the classes? any other general tips?

 

[fistbumpsgalore]

Whoa, slow down a bit. How about getting good at requirements analysis, database design, and basic workflow engineering to start? That will get you through Year 1. Then, ask where. I usually advise knowledge on Intersystems Cache and their form of globals called classes if you want to develop, a statistical language and SQL if you want to deal with analysis, and either the NIH or medical school if you want to lead. In all cases, having knowledge of interface development and protocol messaging helps with external system issues.

But at this point, focus on what is in front of you.

duly noted. thanks for the reply. will follow up in a year once I get my foundation.

 

[gwarm01]

going to do work on an existing system. we've spoken before on reddit, just using a different username. lol. do you recommend bringing a laptop or a note pad for the classes? any other general tips?

Hah, that figures.

They will provide pen, paper, and a physical copy of their book. You'll also be doing a lot of work on their computers, so your laptop would just get in the way. I recommend taking good notes in the textbook and try to contextualize the lessons into your real world work. Since you're working in a mature system, your build may be significantly different from the foundation system that the training is based on.