Triage Considerations for the Analyst Beginning Their Career

At the beginning of my career starting out in informatics as a pharmacy applications analyst, I was hyper focused on fixing as many things as I could. I think in a way it made me feel more useful to my teams and to pharmacists in the field that I looked up to.  My workflow has changed in priority over the years and I’ve come to realize that, especially for analysts early in their career, it is best to keep this in mind:

Focus on identifying and fixing the actual root cause of the issue. A lot of times it may be easier or faster to do one thing but without properly assessing what future implications the fix might have, we end up creating more work for ourselves or more importantly, for others later on.

In addition, here are some other questions I like to think about broken down from a problem vs solution perspective.  While you may not need to go into this much detail with everything that comes up, I like to come back to this list whenever I have an issue that is complex or is giving me a hard time.  There’s been times when answering one of these questions has changed my opinion on what the best solution for the organization is. Hopefully this can help you if you are just starting off in informatics.

Problem Analysis

• What is the issue?
• Where does this issue fall in terms of prioritization with your current workload?
• Which departments or groups are affected by this issue?
• What tools does my electronic health system record already have to address this issue?
• Is this actually a training problem?
• What are the patient safety concerns for a repeat issue?
• What are the legal concerns for a repeat issue?
• What are the economic concerns for a repeat issue?
• Is this a common issue or an unusual one?

Solution Analysis

• Who is the primary operational owner?
• Is this a custom build or a new workflow? If so, how might it align with future EHR functionality?
• What are the pros and cons of this solution?
• What other teams need to be involved in the build?
• Which governance groups need to give approval?
• What type of testing is needed? Think about the most important positive/negative testing scenarios.
• How does this build affect current and future reporting?
• What type of training is needed?
• What are the maintenance implications of this build?

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