10 years ago if you said you had a job implementing an electronic medical record (EMR if you prefer, and yes this was before the EHR term became in vogue), you’d really be at the cutting edge of technology being implemented in healthcare. Was there anything better in healthcare technology at that time? Maybe robotic surgery or something, but from a non-medical device technology, EMR was the latest and greatest cutting edge technology.
These days getting a job implementing an EHR, managing your EHR implementation, EHR trainer, etc feels like an old school job that’s more focused on maintenance than cutting edge technology. What would be considered a cutting-edge health IT job today?
If you want a cutting-edge health IT job today then you’re going to have to work on things like wearables, sensors, mobile, and analytics. You might add things like virtual reality, 3D printing, machine learning, AI, and other exciting tech advances.
While all of these technologies are extremely exciting for healthcare, it’s pretty hard for someone to find a job in healthcare doing any of these things. The person who does this kind of work usually isn’t hired. Usually, they’re someone internal to the company who discovers some of these technologies and grows into that position. It’s not like a hospital’s HR department can post a job for a virtual reality position and get a bunch of qualified candidates.
The closest most organizations come to these type of cutting-edge health IT jobs is someone with the title of Chief Innovation Officer. That person is generally charged with evaluating all of these types of new technology.
While today these jobs are hard to find, 10 years from now that will evolve the same way EHR jobs have evolved. Every healthcare organization will have their director of virtual reality or their 3D printing manager. The plethora of healthcare analytics related jobs will explode (and in some ways this is already happening). For now, you’ll likely have to take another IT position and grow into those other positions.