Getting Exposure to Pharmacy Informatics as a Pharmacy Student

One of the key things that 2-year combined pharmacy informatics residency programs look for in student applicants is that they have at LEAST some exposure to informatics and have the ability to articulate WHY they are interested in informatics during time in pharmacy school. However, pharmacy informatics is often forgotten or glossed over within the pharmacy school curriculum at most institutions.  Structured opportunities for informatics exposure are usually limited to non-existent. For those students who are interested in informatics, it can be very frustrating to find experiences to either explore their interest or begin building their CV in anticipation of applying to residencies in the future.

Pro-Tip:  Do not wait to start APPEs

While some schools offer APPE rotations for final year students, there are some pitfalls with delaying getting informatics experience until then. For one, you may end up with your informatics rotation scheduled after your residency interviews. Another is that you lose out on the chance to demonstrate a consistent interest in informatics throughout your pharmacy school career. Additionally, informatics rotations tend to be variable based on what projects are ongoing that month, so there’s no guarantee that during the month you rotate through that you’ll be able to get involved in a project you’re interested in. Finally, PGY1 residencies are generally biased towards candidates with extensive clinical rotation experiences and an APPE rotation in informatics will mean one less opportunity to take a clinical rotation.

In this article, I outline ways that you can get informatics exposure.  Topics include the following:

• Shadowing

• Being on Informatics Teams

• Getting Involved (Indirectly) within Hospital

• Networking

• Education

Shadowing for Success

• Check to see if there are any opportunities to shadow or get involved with informatics pharmacists already offered through your school. Checking with the dean’s office is usually a good idea since they may be aware of unlisted opportunities or be able to tell you what other interested students have done in the past.

Being on Informatics Teams

• Look to see if there are informatics teams at hospitals affiliated with your school or even local hospitals and reach out. You can start with shadowing to get a feel for the team but consider offering to volunteer to help with projects afterwards. You can get involved as early as P1 year and this gives you a lot of flexibility to get longitudinal exposure to a broad range of informatics topics.

Getting Involved (Indirectly) with Informatics within Hospital

• Research what projects are being offered to students and see if any have an informatics focus. If there are not any publicized, consider reaching out to your dean’s office or hospital pharmacy administration to inquire about opportunities. Many hospital pharmacy projects contain an informatics component to them, especially larger academic medical centers, and can offer insight into how informatics works with other departments.
• Consider getting indirectly involved. For example, drug information pharmacists often assist the informatics department by helping inform medication build within the electronic health record. Reaching out to see if you can get involved with that step of the process, either shadowing or volunteering to help, is one possible avenue for getting experience from a unique perspective and building up a valuable skillset. A few other possibilities for getting involved with the “user” side of informatics would be pharmacy administration, medication safety pharmacy, and management of research/clinical studies.

Network Makes the Best Work

• Try networking and getting involved with informatics pharmacists. Making connections in informatics pharmacy can open opportunities for you and broaden your perspective. For example, ASHP offers pharmacy informatics events at their national meetings that offer great opportunities to listen to informatics pharmacists talk about their experiences and meet them afterwards. They also offer an online forum on pharmacy informatics and technology.
• Broaden your search by using digital technologies. With the growing popularity of meeting clients like Zoom or Teams, it is now possible to do virtual shadowing or even to get involved with more distant institutions or companies to get yet another perspective on the field. If you want to try engaging with a distant institution, there’s little risk to reaching out to them and they may even agree to have you work with them.

Education – Building the Foundation

• Identify if there are any graduate programs, like the Masters in Health Information Technology (MHIT) that you may qualify for, as these can give you a good guided exposure to informatics concepts and start you with a solid foundation. Not every school offers an MHIT degree, so alternatives can be taking part-time courses at a nearby college or completing a certification program like ASHP’s Pharmacy Informatics Certificate or a Certified Associate in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CAHIMS) offered by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
• Involved yourself with informatics at your internships. Whether you are gaining hours working at a community pharmacy or rotating through the hospital on your IPPE, letting your preceptor or supervisor know that you’re interested in getting more exposure to informatics can give you the opportunity to get involved in things like system updates, new technology implementations, and trouble shooting issues at your site. The same goes for your non-informatics APPE rotations in the 4^th year, as many clinical preceptors have clinical informatics requests they submit and may even have an informatics related task they’ve been hesitating to pursue because they didn’t have the time to follow up on it.
• Read up on pharmacy informatics online. Reading is not a replacement for hands-on experience, but you can increase the breadth and depth of your informatics knowledge by taking an interest and looking into it. Whether it is reading academic review articles on PubMed detailing various aspects of the field or browsing magazines like Healthcare IT News to see the latest trends, you’ll be able to learn the language and slowly develop a better understanding of informatics.

Informatics is a highly diverse and exciting field of pharmacy that often gets overlooked. While pharmacy schools are struggling to integrate opportunities for students to engage with informatics, there are still plenty of ways to get involved if you are willing to show some initiative and do a little leg work.