Before you think hiring health care informatics consultant for any purpose, you must understand why medical informatics consultant or health domain experts are to be included while dealing with any computer application that is related to medical field. Healthcare informatics is the science that combines the computer technology and medical field. Consultant in medical informatics is expected to have knowledge of both the domains i.e. computer language and medical standards and its flow. Medical informatics experts are good at EHR, PHR, HL7, DICOM, SNOMED, LOINC etc. medical standards as well as computer languages such as Core Java, HTML, and XML etc.
Unlike other software applications, the one that is made for healthcare or medical use is not allowed to malfunction. This is because for other computers, the bug in software might crush the system and at the most, one may lose data but think about the scene where software is installed checking the oxygen saturation in the blood and alarming when it goes down contains some bug and it does not notify when the oxygen level falls in patient’s blood due to which, the patient does not receive proper amount of life-gas and dies on the spot. Said this, computer application that was installed to save the life ultimately costs patient’s life.
To overcome issues related to medical process in computer applications, you require domain experts from health industries, preferably doctors with good experience in hospitals, clinics or health care centers. Medical informatics functional consultant is the one with adequate knowledge of computer applications and also he is experienced in his own field and knows alpha and omega of patients health. Such experts can be hired by IT companies when they have medical projects or these guys are absorbed by corporate hospitals for medical software maintenance and training medical staff about computer applications.