r/healthIT

TLDR: Looking for insight from allied health professionals(rad techs, respiratory therapists, etc.) who pivoted into Health IT.

Hello all, I'm currently working as a technologist in a very niche section of allied health(sleep medicine) in the US. I'm one of the crazy people who actually enjoys patient care, but my current role is essentially a dead end. There isn't really anywhere for me to go from here unless I switch to either teaching or managing a sleep lab. I'm currently making 75k in a VHCOL area(SoCal). Techs CAN make 100k after decades in the field, but it's very rare. Money is definitely a concern in the long run.

I understand that the market is very tough and difficult to predict right now. But in your collective opinion, is this a worthwhile field to get into long term? I just turned 28, and I feel like I need to start laying groundwork to pivot sooner rather than later.

I currently have an associates degree directly related to my field. I've worked with Cerner for most of my career, but I am in the process of moving to a new job where Epic is used instead. The hospital system will pay 5k a year for education as long as it is healthcare related. Tuition at public state schools out here runs about 8k a year, so I could get a bachelor's for 6k plus additional fees.

My question specifically for the folks who've made a similar transition: how'd you do it? Did you get a BS in Computer Science, or focus on getting certifications/self study? Which programming languages are you primarily working with? Python? SQL? Java? How difficult was the transition for you? Do you ever regret switching careers?

Thanks for reading, and any responses are appreciated.

How do you handle HIPAA and GDPR compliance when sharing visual patient data (like skin lesions or gait videos) with outside researchers?

I am trying to understand the process. Do you just manually blur faces in Premiere/Photoshop? Do you just avoid sharing it entirely? How much of a bottleneck is this?

I recently left an ECSA role where I was regularly working more than 50 hours per week and participating in an every-other-week on-call rotation. Our team was responsible for a broad range of responsibilities, as management rarely declined new projects, and our small group was expected to support them all. In addition to our core duties, we built and patched our own servers and provided ongoing support for numerous CC sites, each requiring significant attention.

In speaking with other ECSAs at XGM, my impression is that many did not have the same breadth of responsibilities and were generally able to maintain a standard 40-hour workweek. I'm interested in hearing from other ECSAs about their workload and whether their experiences have been similar.

Hello,

I posted a form of this question in the epicsystems sub, got some great responses, but it was recommended I post my questions here also. Not quite a crosspost, some new questions here.

I have good reason to believe that a nosy doctor, who is no way connected to my father's care, has viewed his chart at least 1x (via Haiku or otherwise) and likely shared some of the info with another party. I understand there is no real way to prove this save for contacting the hospital system & have them investigate. I was told I could file a complaint with a governing authority like medicare or likewise, but I really want to be certain before doing so. I have a few questions & any help or tips would be greatly appreciated.

1. Is it as easy as typing my father's name into the Haiku app (his name is not at all common) and his records are visible?
2. How simple is the audit. Is it literally (my dad's name + doctor's name) and IT can see if the chart was accessed. It would have happened in 2024 & 2025.
3. From experience, how serious is the penalty for the doctor. Is it taken seriously by the hospital administration?
4. Will the doctor be informed that this is being reviewed? Will the doctor know I initiated it?
5. Is it common for Doctor's to do this sort of thing? Does it happen?
6. I know this is an odd question, but is there any reason I shouldn't contact the hospital. Family is not happy about this & I have no love for this guy myself. In fact, got pretty irate about it as we made clear we did not want to discuss this health situation with anyone.
7. How would you handle it if it was your dad & the Doctor is a jerk.

Thanks to anyone who can take a moment to respond.

Epic workgroups have been stressful to say the least. My department works primarily in stork and the acute care workgroups have made big decisions that impact us without our input. We just started training classes for staff and are onboarding EIGHTEEN travel nurses on ultrashort contracts to makeup for all the bedside staff that needed to be superusers.

Naturally my team is a bit on edge. How can me and my leadership team support my bedside nurses at and after go live?

We have big unit (about 140 nurses) and there are 6 of us in our leadership team. We are all superusers and planning to have 24/7 coverage along with our 18 staff superusers for the first 2 weeks of go live.

We are putting together survival guides with all our tip sheets in there, are finding epic tips and tricks on TikTok, plan to have snacks and food available… what else can we do?? What worked well for your teams or not well?! My staff makeup is roughly 20% Gen Z, 40% millennials, 30% Gen X and 10% boomers. If it matters.

I've been noticing a pattern in a lot of conversations around enterprise AI for healthcare operations.

The technology doesn't seem to be the thing holding people back.

I keep seeing the same thing in implementation discussions, it sounds like teams are spending more time untangling undocumented workflows, spreadsheet trackers, email chains, manual workarounds outside the EHR and figuring out who actually owns a process than they are evaluating AI itself.

Maybe that's just the organizations I've been hearing from but it made me wonder if this is a common experience.

For those who've worked on enterprise AI projects for healthcare operations, what ended up being the biggest blocker; the technology itself or just understanding how the work actually gets done before trying to improve it?

Have been applying for epic entry positions and have had one job interview (I am hopeful) and many rejection e-mails. I've generally tailored my resume's individually for every job posting as I have 6 years experience as an MLS employee with 3 years being with Epic, and nearly completed a CS degree.

While many seem to require certifications, I've tried to focus on those that don't but those seem few and far in between. Should I look elsewhere into other positions as an entry way or should I just keep applying? Anything I could possibly do to strengthen my application?

Hello everyone!

I’m looking for recommendations for a fully or almost fully online Master’s degree in Digital Health, Health Informatics, Clinical Informatics, or AI in Healthcare.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any strong programs in my country, and because of family and professional commitments, relocating abroad for 1–2 years isn’t an option.

I’ve looked at Vanderbilt University’s program, but at $70k+ for a two-year online degree, it seems difficult to justify the cost.

I’m particularly interested in programs in the US or Europe with a strong reputation, ideally focused on digital transformation in healthcare, clinical informatics, AI, interoperability, and healthcare innovation.

Any recommendations or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

I just got an offer for a job as a Clinical Systems Analyst for Imaging systems at a large multi-state hospital that I am going to accept, and I could not be more excited. This will be my first job that isn't entry level, so it's a milestone for me with a very significant pay increase.

For background context, I super recently got my Associate's Degree at a local community college in CSIS with an emphases in Network and Systems Administration and Network Routing and Switching. I currently work on the IT Service Desk, about to hit my 2-year anniversary at another large hospital system using ServiceNow, providing remote hospital IT support and supporting MyChart. I was looking for an Epic certified Analyst job, and this one is not certified, but I think it is actually even better for me because it opens up the doors to literally every other career path I've been seriously interested in and trying to choose between including Systems Analysis, Systems Administration, Application Analysis, and even Imaging Technologist programs that I was considering before I chose Health IT 3 years ago instead. Before the IT Service Desk, I worked for two years as an enhanced scheduler for an outpatient specialty clinic that used Cerner and has recently transitioned to Epic. That org is also a part of the same org that made the job offer I'm about to accept, so I'm going back. Finally, before that, I worked for another state-wide hospital system in a specialty clinic as a Patient Access Specialist using Epic Cadence and Prelude, so I'm already experienced with Epic.

I'm posting this to ask for advice from other analysts in similar roles. I want badly to succeed here. The experience it'll provide will be invaluable and really open more doors than ever in my life. I'll also be surrounded by experienced analysts who I may also be able to look to as mentors. What input does anyone experienced in health IT have on this?

TL;DR: I recently got offered a job with the title in the description, and I am very excited, but also nervous about the learning curve. What advice does anyone with health IT experience have to help me be successful in the first 6 months?

What certs do you have? How did you break in? What was your role before Epic?

I’m looking to break in. I have extensive HIM background as well as EMPI work. Currently pursuing a proficiency self study in Epic ROI.

I work in ER Registration. Last job, we used Epic. Came to this job & they were using MedHost. Swapping to Meditech tomorrow. They let us sit in on one “class” that had nothing to do with ER. Are there any pages/videos or tips that anyone could give? I’ve searched everywhere. Everything I’ve found has been on the nursing/clinical side. Any help is greatly appreciated!!

Sudden cardiac death is, in principle, preventable with an implantable defibrillator, but the hard part is knowing who needs one. The single biomarker in wide use is left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), basically how strongly the heart squeezes, measured by ultrasound. The problem is that LVEF misses most people who die suddenly, and at the same time over-flags others, since about two-thirds of defibrillators placed for low LVEF never end up delivering a life-saving shock. So the field has wanted a better predictor for a long time, and the ECG, which is cheap and everywhere, has been an obvious place to look.

The team trained a deep-learning model on every ECG from an entire Swedish region linked to death certificates, and they did something unusually disciplined: they locked away 40% of the data and did not touch it until after the paper was provisionally accepted, which is about the strongest guard against overfitting you can ask for. In that held-out set the model predicted sudden cardiac death within a year with an AUC of 0.872, well above standard cardiovascular risk scores (around 0.70). Their chosen high-risk group was the riskiest 2.2% of people, who had a 7.0% annual rate of sudden cardiac death, higher than the 4.6% rate in the group with reduced LVEF. The striking number is the overlap: 86% of the model's high-risk patients were not flagged by LVEF at all. Even among people with a normal LVEF, where today there is essentially no way to stratify risk, the model picked out a group at higher risk than the reduced-LVEF patients. And as suggestive (not definitive) evidence of real stakes, high-risk patients who happened to have a defibrillator already in place died about 54% less often than expected.

It held up outside Sweden too. With no retraining, the model hit an AUC of 0.822 for predicting the ventricular arrhythmias that cause sudden death in a US health system, and 0.767 for future arrhythmic cardiac arrests in a Taiwanese registry. They also ran a clever specificity check: the model did poorly (near chance, 0.58) at predicting non-arrhythmic arrests, which is what you want, since it suggests it is picking up arrhythmic death specifically rather than just "sick person." Then the genuinely novel part. Because a neural net cannot tell you what it sees, they paired it with a generative model that morphs a real low-risk ECG into a higher-risk version, letting them visualize the signal. Out came some known features (left axis deviation, poor R-wave progression) plus a previously undescribed one: a slurred tail on the QRS complex in lead aVL. Tracing that back to physiology, they propose diffuse myocardial fibrosis as the underlying culprit, supported by blinded heart-MRI review showing more diffuse scarring in high-risk patients. A telling detail: in those same patients' charts, no cardiologist had ever noted the fibrosis.

The limits are real and the authors are upfront about them. The defibrillator survival benefit is observational, drawn from patients already selected for devices under current practice, so it cannot prove a defibrillator would help these newly flagged patients. They explicitly call for a randomized trial, which is the right next step. The training label, death certificates, is imperfect for pinning down arrhythmic cause, though the multi-country arrhythmia validation cushions that. And this is a research model, not a deployed or cleared tool.

What you can follow

The conceptual shift worth tracking is from structural risk (how weak is the pump) to electrical risk read straight off the waveform, since these turn out to identify largely different people. The thing that would change practice is a randomized trial in the model's high-risk group, so watch for that. Two other threads are interesting: the generative "morphing" approach is a general recipe for turning an opaque model into a human-inspectable hypothesis, and the fibrosis story plus the aVL feature could feed back into ordinary ECG reading if they replicate. AI-ECG is a fast-moving area generally, so expect a wave of similar models, and apply the usual scrutiny about held-out validation and external cohorts.

Are there tests available today to measure this?

The input is about as available as medicine gets: a standard 12-lead ECG is cheap, fast, and probably already in your chart if you have seen a cardiologist. The catch is that this specific model is not a product you can request, not regulatory-cleared, and not running in clinics. Some AI-ECG tools are FDA-cleared for other tasks (detecting low ejection fraction or atrial fibrillation), but not this sudden-death biomarker. One nuance from the paper: single-lead versions of the model performed almost as well on discrimination, which is intriguing for the wearable era, but it would be a real stretch to read this as "your smartwatch can predict sudden cardiac death," and nobody should treat a consumer single-lead trace that way. If anyone here works in a system piloting AI-ECG risk tools, real deployment experience would be valuable, since this field is moving from papers to products quickly.

What you can track

This is a topic where the honest answer is that the action item is professional, not self-tracking. The modifiable, measurable drivers of cardiac risk are the familiar ones (blood pressure, ApoB or LDL, glucose, not smoking, cardiorespiratory fitness), and they are worth tracking on their own merits. But the specific signal here is not something to chase at home. The genuinely useful move is recognizing red flags that warrant a real cardiology workup: unexplained fainting, episodes of racing or irregular heartbeat, or a family history of sudden or unexplained death at a young age. Those are reasons to get evaluated, ECG included, rather than anything to monitor with a gadget.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10674-6

15-year CT tech with SC-300 in progress, looking at PACS/informatics vs. IAM — anyone made this jump?

Has anyone gone from any modality into IT/ Security or Health Informatics? How hard was it? Was the salary much better? And how did you get your foot in the door. I am at a cross roads, where I either stay at my position for another 20 years or I go into Management. So I’m looking for advice and my options. Thanks.

Hello there,

I am still relatively new to using Epic - started a new role at a big health system back in January. Never used Epic before, had to go to HQ to get certifications in Cogito/Caboodle/Clarity/Revenue Data Models. I’ve found most of my work so far to be running queries in SSMS, then exporting it into excel to give clinicians/doctors/finance people some ad hoc reporting. Not complaining so far 😃

I was wondering where roles similar to mine are headed long-term. I hate to bring up AI, but it does feel like a lot of data/financial analyst roles could become at risk. However, it sounds like companies have pretty high demand for people with Epic expertise. Is this mostly just because of its fast growth and implementation by many other health systems over the past decade? Just having worked within the ecosystem for a bit now, I don’t see how automation couldn’t become a bigger part of this. Especially with the BI tools in Cogito, seems like something that clinicians could eventually figure out themselves how to utilize, or at least figure out how to get the right prompt to deliver what they need.

Hopefully I’m wrong, I’d love to hear your feedback!

TL;DR - I'm looking for an online only/remote healthcare related IT/PACS type degree path somewhere, am capable of googling but haven't found anything of substance and would like some opinions if possible of what others have done/enjoyed.

I did the IT -> PACS Admin path. I have a long history of server, network, and security admin experience stretching back to the late 90s. I have worked at my relatively small town hospital for 15 years and specifically in Imaging as a PACS admin for 8. At my hospital I am my own IT dept as I manage my own network, VMs, virtual hosts, storage, PACS servers etc. I even do biomed type work on the modalities and other equipment.

I have associates degrees in arts and sciences.

I'm interested in continuing my education and would like to point it in the direction of healthcare/IT/PACS but our local college doesn't have anything even slightly resembling that trajectory.

I'm looking for an online only/remote healthcare related IT/PACS type degree path somewhere, am capable of googling but haven't found anything of substance and would like some opinions if possible of what others have done/enjoyed.

Edited to remove potentially identifying info without a dirty delete. Appreciate everyone's feedback.

Where I currently work, I'm at the top of my pay scale at 120k. While I'm happy enough with my current employer, I'm not willing to accept never getting a raise again and intend to update my resume and start looking for a new position. I have been fully remote since long before COVID and do not want to relocate, so a new employer would need to allow me to stay remote.

I am a pharmacist that managed to do proficiency in WIP and land a role with a company going through implementation. An informatics team already exists for most disciplines, and the pharmacy informatics team already has several pharmacists. Like the title states, I’m starting to become concerned about job redundancy.

The informatics team has a certified pharmacist and recently determined that while they will not primarily focus on build, they will own ERXs post-GL, which has my wondering if my FTE will be questioned after implementation. I am the only new hire to the team, and was hired on Epic’s recommendation (requirement?) to staff a pharmacist on the analyst team. There was already an established analyst team for Cerner who are all certified and switching to the Epic team. We will have 1 consultant joining the team with plenty of experience but not a pharmacist. For context, it is a fairly small org with only 2 hospitals.

Our GL is well over a year from now which gives me some time, but would it be wise to prepare for the worst case scenario of my job being cut post-GL due to redundancy with informatics?

I’m really having trouble with this. I found classes to sit for a CEHRS test. Then I hear that RHIT and HIM are better to get. Then I hear that the Health Information career is being taken over by AI.

I need a job soon. Im 41, and Im interested in an entry-level medical field option. I need either a WFH or desk job. I was in retail and customer service and call centers and I am absolutely sick of it. I decided to get credentials via schooling but having trouble finding the right place to start without wasting time/getting ripped off.

I have experience in some medical records working in Oxygen delivery for patients. I spoke to nurses and updated info. Im technically savvy, have a high-school diploma, and am easy to work with. I have the basic qualities to start.

I just need a start. I don’t have years but I want enough to be accredited for a decent job. Even if it’s entry-level. Can I start with CEHRS? If I need HIM or RHIT, I just need guidance on a school/course to be moving in the right direction. I live in Arizona.

Thank you to anyone who can share advice.

33 yo male with an AA in psychology from years ago - Considering a HIM degree because I really want to work in clinical healthcare but logistically can’t make the clinical hours work unfortunately. Currently a custodian who desperately wants to get out and get into a less physically demanding career with more opportunities.

People with BS HIM + RHIA, are we happy? Was the degree worth it? Any feedback/thoughts would be helpful, thank you!