I have a hybrid position doing technical support for IT and Clinical Informatics, but I feel that much of the nature of my job is quite specific to the hospital I work in. That said... here is a bit about what I observe:

• In our org, CI is about 85-90% one thing, and that is supporting and managing our EMR system, in our case Epic. The entire CI staff, including the director, spend most of their day helping users deal with the byzantine maze that is navigating the software. Sometimes they are coaching and training users, other times they are doing high-level strategy to map new methods of use. Sometimes they are dashing into a surgery room to assist with a malfunctioning computer.

The CI staff are probably the most technically savvy group outside of pure IT. However, the IT group are way less open-minded, forward thinking, or frankly, socially skilled as the CI staff. The narrow vision of IT makes sense in a hospital setting where reliability is way more important than exciting new features, but the CI staff seem to have a much better grasp of usability, design, and the "human" element of software.

As for education, the dept lead has a Masters in Informatics. Much of the other staff are RNs who chose it as a specialty. A few of them, like myself, have good educations, but outside the field and have fallen into it.

The management is... I believe this will be very unique to each organization so do not want to say too much. I'll say that in my group, CI seems to have more autonomy than most other groups in this hospital, probably because nobody understands what they do.

The people, as mentioned, are slightly more tech-oriented and progressive than overall is the case in the hospital. There is a distinct split between younger and older generations, about half and half. The younger folks are the computer experts and hold higher levels of responisbility. The older generation, who no doubt were wizards with paper charts and filing techniques, have kindof burned out and while they can do wonders with writing DB queries and solving problems which take weeks or months to resolve, they themselves have a lot of trouble adapting to frequently changing software and hardware issues.

Hours are also likely to be variable. We have office coverage from 7 - 6, which people taking 8 hours shifts. Someone is on call at all times. There are periods, such as after a major software upgrade, where long nights and weekends are asked.

I did not come from nursing but am friends with those who have. They have mixed feelings. It is nice to be off the floor, or to spend an hour or so a day on the floor. They miss some of the patient interaction, but not the endemic hazing and politics of nursing.

If someone is deadset on Health IT as a career, I feel it is quite worth exploring. That said, I would personally look at other types of IT work, myself. This is simply the largest employer in my area... I would way rather be doing multimedia or other, more creative types of development.

Good luck with your pursuit