Health information exchange a promising IT career in healthcare

Career in  Healthcare Information Exchange aka HIE is gaining momentum starting 2014. More healthcare organizations /practices have determined to implement HIE that permits the transfer of information/sharing of patient data across practices. So, what will be my role in HIE? HIE as such is a big project involving : 1) Creation of application systems that support this kind of communication 2) Testing of such systems 3) Validating the results 4) Maintaining and supporting such systems As such it is a new concept in Healthcare IT that requires developer, tester, admins, implementation consultants What do I need to know to find my slot in HIE? It is another healthcare IT concept. Hence developing the following skill sets definitely helps 1) HL7 is the communication standard popularly used by healthcare application systems to talk to each other. Learning HL7 is a definite plus 2) Knowledge of Object oriented programming languages helps in finding role as developer. Most popularly used languages include C/C++/C#/Java 3) Backend database query knowledge helps. This becomes mandate to determine if the data is properly transferred from one system to another. Inspite of front-end knowledge back-end helps 4) OS,networking basics helps in troubleshooting communication issues if any Over and above all HIE standard can be learnt from the organization that drafts it. Understanding this and its basic architectural components including profiles on radiology, pediatric and such specialties definitely helps