I hope as you've been going through this course, this specialization, you're thinking about what does all this have to do with me? I just want to spend a few minutes talking about careers in informatics and give you some thoughts. So, where are the jobs in informatics? Not in health IT, but informatics. So, no surprise. There are jobs in hospitals and healthcare providers, whether it be the small or whether it be the large practice, or whether it be the large integrated delivery network and accountable care organization. The very, very small practices probably do not have job openings for informaticians. They're going to hire a consultant and they're going to do whatever they can. So, that actually brings up consultancies, which is a little further down. Vendors, startups, and consultancies, depending on their level of sophistication, they may or may not want informaticians. They all need them, but sometimes they don't always know that. Similarly for health information exchanges and government agencies, increasingly, if you understand informatics, the boundary between IT and clinical practice, what should be done. The information exchanges which are responsible for linking many, many different health systems together, truly it's not just HIT. Similarly, government as you know, spends lot of time thinking about policy, but they need people who understand the IT and understand the dangers of the mismatch between policy in IT. It put yours truly, universities last, faculty in universities, people making academic careers out of it. Sorry, whether it be in innovation, which is more focus on getting products to the hospital internally, or even commercialized, or whether it's Informatics Research for figuring out what should be done with new technologies. There is certainly a growing need for informaticians. You should not be shocked that I have way, a framework for thinking about the different roles that even an informatician can take in any one of these organizations. A user is probably not going to be the informatician, but you should realize that a lot of people around you who know how to use software, in fact, you want to make sure you're designing towards them. But many informaticians are used in the role of evaluator. Sometimes, this is a super user but you'd prefer to be somebody who has some informatics understanding to again, to understand the fit between what's needed and what's available, has some understanding of the types of evaluation work that can be done, the studies that can be done, we would call it that. This specify with somebody getting closer to creating the requirements and then eliciting the requirements, spelling out the specification, maybe even helping with the design, requires a bit more informatic savvy and experience. The builder, the people building the software generally are more IT oriented, but again, if you have an informatician on that team, you're more likely to prevent disasters or to cut the development time by couple of years. The maintainer is generally the IT staff but it could be at a high level the informatician, who's making sure that the explicit knowledge is kept up-to-date, that the rules are up-to-date, and is monitoring for problems that the IT folks just may not be sensitive to. Finally, I have the innovator. Again, the innovator can be somebody internally or it could be academic innovation, it can be developing new IT, or it could be developing new informatics which is a new way of thinking about a problem to help figuring out what should be done. If you want more education, there are masters degrees. Increasingly, they're accredited by CAHIIM in the United States. A lot of the clinical fellowships in informatics come associated with either a masters degree or a certificate which is another way of getting didactic learning or there's getting a PhD in informatics, there's no accreditation for this. Increasingly, there are other doctoral pathways, the doctor of public health sometimes has an informatics pathway. In some places, they're developing a doctorate of health informatics practice, DRHI. I hope it's not DRHIP because I don't think anybody would want to be Doctor Hip. Then, there's a lot of data science. I hope [inaudible] may be sensitive data science captures half of informatics, that afferent side. The side of the data coming into informatic central. The other part of it had to get it out, how to create interventions. That is not really covered by data science. But if you want the data science track, then you have computer science, people to think about, biomedical engineering, biostatistics. There are a number of venues where you can get both masters and PhDs, now in metadata science as its own, or in some of these associated areas. A closing comment for the entire specialization, if not just this course, is to please remember, "Can versus Should". The IT can do many things. Your apps can do many things. The data can mean many things. What should you do, what should it mean? Do use the stack on a daily basis to figure out where you're at. Do anticipate harm. IT will kill people, it's your responsibility to make sure it kills as few people as possible while you're enhancing quality and efficiency and all that as well. Finally, it's very exciting. You've heard me talk about the trough of despair or the trough of disillusionment. So, first of all, the only way to go, the only place to go is up. We have tons of new technologies that the world is in a new place where conditions are all computed up. The users are all computed up, so the world is our oyster, and we have lots of stuff to do, and I hope that these principles will help you as you forge your own pathway in this amazing career.
