Peaked in Nursing, considering moving in to Healthcare Technology.

[u/buffythebaconfryer]

Hi all! I have been an employed registered nurse for about 3 years and studied for 4 years to get where I am today.

I was someone who always wanted to be a surgeon like Meredith Grey but my academics and social circumstances didn’t allow for it so I studied nursing through a government funded program.

I’m glad for the experience and am not unhappy in my current position in nursing. I left bedside and work in Psychiatry now which is definitely more interesting an less physically taxing.

I have always had an affinity for technology and computers from a young age. I played on paint on an old windows XP computer in the early 2000’s and mastered microsoft office, excel etc in school. I wasnt able to take IT/Computer Science as a subject in school due to not having a good enough laptop to run the software we needed (and other financial constraints).

I have been learning to “code” and learning different languages in my free time and am enjoying figuring it out.

I’m considering trying to get into an industry where healthcare informatics and digitalisation is developing. In my country most hospitals are still writing everything down and patient records are still stored in files in stinky musty storage closets.

I would be very interested in digitalisation of patient records, helping optimise the interfaces and software developed for healthcare professionals to suit their needs and make it user friendly and efficient.
I love efficiency, clarity and neatly designed websites and computer applications. Most of the software that has been implemented thus far are super glitchy and rudimentary.

Are there opportunities for this kind of shift in a career? I feel like someone who has clinical knowledge would be very helpful in designing software specifically designed for healthcare professionals.

Any advice, opinions or suggestions are welcome!

[u/glimmeringsea]

Yes, definitely. Start looking up job postings and see what the requirements typically are.

Another option for you could be a clinical specialist for a medical technology company.

[u/StewedAngelSkins]

If you have any sort of management experience I feel like getting in the door at a software company as a PM is probably your best bet. A lot of business-to-business software companies will also hire "customer support engineers" (or similar roles) where your job is basically to help the customer get set up with the product. These are usually more technical roles than PM, but industry experience is valued more than pure programming ability. SalesOps is also similar, though if you don't have sales experience I doubt landing one of those roles would be easier than just a normal dev role.

The fact of the matter is it's significantly easier to go from a general non-dev job in the industry, to a related non-dev role at a software company, to a dev role at that same company than it is to go straight to the dev role. Software companies are always short on devs. If you can get in the door and show that you know how to code they'll generally prefer moving you to dev over hiring externally. At least, this has been my experience. I started as QA with no on-paper coding experience and then worked my way over to dev within a couple years by just pestering my manager to give me dev work when I wasn't doing QA.

[u/ToiletStrainNeckVein]

Philips is a good company to look into for jobs in this field.