Leadership and organizational skills are essential when the informaticist is also a project manager.
Carl Butler
Discussion Module Week VIII
COLLAPSE
Selection, Implementation, and Delivery
Nelson and Staggers (2014) pinpointed within their work, that Health Care Informatics is a necessary discipline that requires many different skills, in an ever-changing electronic revolving world. It is a critical task for individuals to be able to adept within such a technology driven world, possessing the right skills to overcome the obstacles of such intricate changes. Facing the pressure to formulate the growth and expansion of eHealth, the need for skilled and educated individuals for this growing field is significantly high. Throughout many parts of the world, healthcare has been deemed one of the largest sectors of the economy (Nelson & Staggers, 2014). “Healthcare occupations and industries are expected to have the fastest employment growth and to add the most jobs between 2014 and 2024” (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). Of this growth, it is predicted that by 2024 there will be over five million healthcare openings, and of those openings over one million will pertain to health technologists and technicians (Carousel, 2016).
As the healthcare industrial sectors are shifting from being a strictly clerical field to a more robust and definitive health informatics field, resources must be required to further the skills of those involved in this innovative field. Communication, organizational, leadership, analytical, and professional healthcare skills are just a few. With a great deal of health informatics working around solving problems and inefficiencies, improving process flows and implementing change management technics is a large part of the work they handle. They must be able to analyze information, how it is gathered, processed, stored, and retrieved and then look for ways to improve upon each of these processes. The use of clear and concise communication, asking specific and pertinent questions to gain a clear view of what is currently in place, and then clearly explaining the new processes, along with the reasoning behind them, to any affected staff members guarantees a higher implementation success rate. (Burning Glass Technologies, 2014)
Leadership and organizational skills are essential when the informaticist is also a project manager. These skills are needed to bring a project from conception through implementation, managing schedules, and timelines, while keeping the project’s budget and other conflicting priorities in line. In addition, individuals may now need professional healthcare skills to successfully compete in the industry. Positions may now require some of the skills and education of a registered nurse and those of an IT technician (Burning Glass Technologies, 2014). In order for informatics to expand globally, there are several obstacles that must be overcome. A lack of semantic interoperability is one of these obstacles. “Key barriers include issues related to the terminology used in describing and documenting health such as cost and accessibility, gaps in exhaustiveness, and lack of granularity” (Nelson & Staggers, 2014, p. 489). Efforts to resolve this obstacle are being analyzed on an international basis. One option is the development of standard clinical data terminology and formatting in HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documentation (Nelson & Staggers, 2014). Additional options are open EHR Archetypes, and data models such as SNOMED CT (Nelson & Staggers, 2014).
As mentioned earlier, the growth of healthcare over the next seven years is going to increase the need for people with specialized informatics skill sets. At this time there are too few individuals with the education and training in eHealth to meet the needs. This has caused a need for a strong human resource strategy, as well as a long-term plan, to meet the demand (Nelson & Staggers, 2014). Looking into available courses within multiple school sites, I have found that there is a huge push for people to look at the informatics training available at these universities.
One additional area where an obstacle has been identified is in the information and communications technology infrastructure. Throughout the world there is what has been deemed a digital divide. This divide has been caused by a gap in the ability to share information between different demographics, caused by internet and broadband uptake. One other cause of this gap is the inconsistency between countries in the number of internet users. For example, in Norway 97.2% of the population uses the internet, where as in Africa only 13.5% are active users (Nelson & Staggers, 2014). An awareness of this problem is the first step in overcoming the challenge. Mobile phones have assisted in bridging this gap as well, but unfortunately just having the technology does not mean one will use it. There is still a greater need for countries to work together to educate the population and to improve the options available. (Nelson & Staggers, 2014)
“Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit” ( John 15:2).
References
Burning Glass Technologies. (2014, December). Missed Opportunities? The Labor Market in Health Informatics, 2014. Retrieved from Burning Glass Careers in Focus: http://burning-glass.com/research/health-informatics-2014/
Carousel, H. (2016, January 19). Health Carousel News & Insights. Retrieved from Healthcarousel.com: https://healthcarousel.com/2016/01/19/healthcare-jobs-become-largest-employment-sector-of-the-u-s-economy/
Nelson, R., & Staggers, N. (2014). Health informatics: An interprofessional approach. St. Louis, MO: Mosby.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2015, December 8). Economic News Release. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm
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