Healthcare IT Support Specialization

This is a very exciting time to be exploring a career in Health IT Support! In this introductory course, you’ll learn about various roles in IT support that are common in healthcare. IT support staff play critical roles in many different healthcare venues. In addition to helping clinics, hospitals, and emergency rooms, you may end up providing support in a skilled nursing facility, ambulatory surgical center, virtual care setting, or even a patient’s home! On any given day, you may interact with nurses, physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, social workers, other allied health professionals, patients or caregivers. Each of these individuals rely on IT support specialists to help them maintain a high reliability healthcare organization. As you learn about what makes Health IT unique, we hope you find inspiration in the stories shared by some of our very own IT support staff at Johns Hopkins. They’ll talk to you about the most common problems they help resolve as well as the complexity and range of issues that arise. Whether you dream of being an end-user computer support specialist, working at a healthcare help desk, or rising to an analyst role, we’re thrilled that you are embarking upon this journey. Welcome again!

In this course you will receive an overview of the health IT ecosystem with a specific focus on the role of electronic health records (EHRs). You’ll be introduced to the factors that contributed to the move from paper records to digitized records and who the most common vendors are. We’ll go over features of EHRs such as computerized provider order entry, clinical decision support, documentation capabilities, and medication reconciliation. Like a physician’s stethoscope, the EHR has become an important tool in healthcare delivery and plays a part throughout the patient’s journey. You’ll go through each of the steps from patient scheduling, to front desk registration, outpatient visits, emergency room encounters, and inpatient admissions.

During the course, we’ll also cover examples of how technical issues related to the EHR can be as simple as problems with logging or password resets. But how they can also be more complex related to alerts that are firing and the display of information. Although some of those challenges are beyond the scope of the IT support staff, having familiarity with the scope of potential problems and the broader EHR landscape is important. This course also includes an introduction to database architecture, servers, and interfaces. We wrap up by discussing the importance of training end-users on healthcare technology and the way in which effective change management strategies are crucial.

Now that you've been introduced to the world of Health IT and the important role played by electronic health records (EHRs), we'll focus on other technologies that play a role in maintaining ongoing operations in healthcare. Telemedicine, patient portals, barcode scanners, printers, and medical devices are just some of the technologies that impact providers and patients. As an IT support specialist, you’ll be asked to troubleshoot issues with a wide variety of tools. You'll see a scenario with a medical device installation where issues related to IP addresses, networking, and MAC addresses come up.

When there are disruptions in technology, you’ll need to use training, tip sheets, and problem-solving skills to determine how best to handle the situation. Supporting a high reliability organization means being familiar with the existing processes and protocols for handling calls, creating tickets, escalating issues, and resolving matters. We’ll introduce you to the concept of self-service tickets and the guidance given to hospital staff on how to submit a ticket. You’ll learn about the different priority levels for tickets as well as the tiers of IT support. When a call comes in, there are some important resources you’ll need to access in order to troubleshoot the problem. These can range from standard question templates to tip sheets to complex matrices and knowledge base articles (KBAs). Having these tools in your arsenal is essential as a Health IT support specialist. We‘ll also cover the JIRA process, the need for excellent documentation, and ways in which requests for change are communicated.