Career Opportunities: Quotes from Physician Information Specialists
The following quotes were collected from physicians working in
information roles in a variety of settings on the future needs for
physicians trained in library and information sciences.
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I think there’s a great opportunity right now… I
really see this as a rebirth [of information science], with new
opportunities and new ways of making itself very relevant for society. Ricardo Pietrobon, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Duke University Health System
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Every single medical school or health organization needs people who
understand information science, even if you’re a community
hospital. You need docs on your staff that can talk to the folks
that are installing electronic health records and understand these
issues. And …in private industry, big Pharma,
the medical device industry, the electronic health record industry,
they desperately need people….. to work with the programmers
& engineers and help them understand the extreme time pressures
that people are under. The delay of changing from one menu to
another that takes a second may seem trivial to the programmer but to a
physician, if you have to click through 20 screens for each patient,
that kind of inefficiency really mounts up. What they are
lacking are people with the clinical gestalt of how things happen on
the ground. Philip Kroth, MD, MS, Assistant
Director, Health Sciences Informatics Program Development; Assistant
Professor, Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center, University
of New Mexico.
- The marketplace holds countless opportunities for someone skilled in
both clinical medicine and information technology. The recent IOM
report strongly supports the use of emerging technologies to enhance
the safety profile of our hospitals and clinics. Across the
country health systems are faced with the challenging task of
implementing these complex systems. Those with the
interdisciplinary skill sets necessary to facilitate these efforts will
rapidly become valuable commodities in the near future. Jeffrey M. Ferrranti, MD, MS,
Director of Computerized Patient Safety Initiatives, and Director of
Pediatric Informatics, Duke University Health System
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Particularly with new initiatives at the federal level for electronic
medical records, and making medical care more efficient, there’s
going to be a huge demand for people who understand medicine and
information science--- to be leaders, to be contributors on product
development, to be policy makers. Frank Davidoff, MD, Executive Editor, Institute for Healthcare Improvement; Editor Emeritus, Annals of Internal Medicine
- I think that the opportunities in library science and information
science or genomics, and bridging together new forms of communities of
practices, published medical literature, clinical data to the point of
care, that’s going to be a very exciting area, so people who
properly train for that are going to be in good shape. Mark Frisse, MD, MBA, MSc,
Director of Regional Informatics Programs, Vanderbilt Center for Better
Health, and Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University
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Many of us are struggling with implementation of electronic medical
records, increased use of electronic documentation, order entry,
closed-loop tracking of drug ordering, adverse event recording, all
those sorts of things… there’s ample
opportunities for graduates from that program to get involved in with
real world applications that could improve health care in the country. Michael Bookman, MD, Medical Director, Ambulatory Care and Clinical Information Systems, Fox Chase Cancer Center
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All these software products have problems in their user interface
design that would benefit from clinicians being involved early, rather
than at the end stage, when everyone’s annoyed with the design. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, MD, Cantab, Consultant, The Advisory Board Company
- [Having information skills and training] puts you in an amazing
position to do a variety of things in the world of information science,
informatics, clinical computing, leadership, education,
whatever… There’s going to be a huge
demand for people who understand medicine and information science to be
leaders, to be contributors on product development, to be policy
makers. It’s huge and very attractive… Founder and President, electronic medical resources company
- If you have expertise in computer sciences and medicine, you can do
everything from helping product development, to doing research as it
relates to the application of technology, go into nomenclature issues,
interoperability, how do you structure information and the knowledge
management side of the field, to actually helping implement complex
systems in a clinical setting. It’s pretty open! Government Official involved in healthcare informatics