How to move from bedside nursing into informatics

Before you start

• Comfort explaining a clinical workflow and where technology helps or creates risk.
• Access to an educator, superuser lead, quality team or digital-health contact in your organization.

Step by step

1. 1

   Inventory your workflow knowledge

   Write down three recurring documentation, handoff, medication or scheduling problems you understand from direct practice.

2. 2

   Become useful on one live project

   Volunteer as a superuser, tester, trainer or clinical representative for an upgrade. Ask for a defined deliverable you can later describe on a résumé.

3. 3

   Learn the language of implementation

   Build basic fluency in requirements, testing, workflow mapping, change management, privacy and adoption metrics.

4. 4

   Create a small portfolio artifact

   Without using confidential information, document a before-and-after workflow, test plan, training outline or issue log that shows how you think.

5. 5

   Target bridge roles

   Search for clinical applications analyst, EHR trainer, implementation specialist, clinical systems educator and informatics coordinator, not only roles titled informatics nurse.

Checklist

Project experience request

Hi [name],

I am interested in developing clinical informatics experience and heard your team is working on [project]. I can contribute frontline knowledge of [workflow] and would like to own a concrete task such as testing, workflow mapping, staff feedback or training support.

Is there a small deliverable I could take on during this project?

Trusted resources

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