I love medical IT stuff. I love having to navigate a weird outgrowth of windows 95 using a trackball and a touchpad that only has an “Up”, “Down” and “Enter” button rendering it functionally the same as the trackball. I love having to find specific files using that interface bearing in mind that nobody has bothered to name a single file on that (Because you would have to do so using the trackball and touchpad) machine for its entire runtime of a decade without anyone having bothered to delete a single file. (Except when it gets filled up and some poor medical student is set to delete *every single file on it by hand, manually, using the fucking touchpad and trackball)
I love that because the average age of management is 90 (With the CEO/Director being in the low 40s) every single piece of software has seven hundred warning pop ups whenever you attempt to do anything, chiefly reminding you that you are being monitored including what patient files you access, but then whenever some doctor is found to have done some egregious fucking crime there’s suddenly no fucking records.
I love that I have 4 apps to access my job at the hospital and they are all just functionally going on a website through the app, and 2 of them are the same website.You right now.

No you must have misread. I said I loved it. Jesus told us to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek and this shit is clearly trying to kill me.
Accidentally being insensitive so I’m removing myself here sorry
Job security?! I’m a temp worker working through an agency that literally auto fires me if I don’t get enough of the first-come first-serve shifts
Oof. That sounds double awful. I was mostly kidding but sorry it sounds like it was not the place for it!
Nah its fine to make jokes. My job is pretty sweet for a student gig anyway, there are definitely people who get paid much less to deal with much more.
nanoangstrom
:nerd: uhm, ackshully ☝️🤓
Healthcare IT is a hellscape and should be avoided at all costs aside unless you’re a very specific technically minded masochist.
On my hands and knees begging the 74 year old neurologists
Oh man, it really is that bad though. I’m on the provider side and got to witness my aged coworkers switch from a legacy EMR system from GE built to work on window 2000 to Epic.
Going to provider training with 75 year old pediatricians trying to figure out how to enter diagnosis codes was like witnessing a senior citizen trying to enact spells from some chaos runes, it just melted their brains. Unfortunately a lot of them ended up retiring all at once.
I still have to listen to my coworker down the hall do all his notes by basically shouting into the dragonspeak wand with his door open.
Why are there 75 year old people working? That’s the main issue imo, those should have retired 10 years ago
You lazy commie millennials wouldn’t understand the work ethic of a hot, red-blooded boomer trying to avoid spending any time with his abused and emotionally destroyed Karen of a wife whose only joy is now tormenting minimum wage workers and his kids who don’t talk to him anymore because he’s a brave patriot who speaks his mind and doesn’t give into the woke left.
Not too far off… I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation and my specialty is kinda famous for being really bad at having families.
But I’d say the underlying cause is more like undiagnosed personality disorder/autism than being patriotic. Most of the older guys are extremely divorced dads who are obsessed with squash if they are brown or golf if they’re white. We also have divorced dad “pretends to be cowboy or in motorcycle gang” if they’re a younger boomer.
My father worked 100+ hour work weeks to avoid his abusive wife, and they’re both confused why they have a poor relationship with all their kids.
Part of it is that I work at a teaching hospital, so a lot of them are mainly here just to pass down knowledge to residents. The other part is that I live in one of the most conservative (poor) states in America and young doctors don’t want to move here, especially if they’ve specialized.
There’s definitely a lot less of them than there were 5 years ago. First wave got taken out(figuratively) when CMS went from Icd-9 codes to icd-10 codes, and everyone had to re-memorize every diagnosis code they use again.
The second wave got taken out(literally) by COVID, we were one of the states where people sued because the hospital made clinicians get vaccinated. So I got to see a bunch of sweet older providers die/be put on oxygen.
And lastly the change over to Epic was just a cherry on top to get the vast majority of the older providers to quit. Now we have huge wait times for most specialty medicine clinics.
The first company to bring in elderly health care providers to consult for ui/ux will instantly raise a 100,000+ strong army that will have ISIS style beheadings of any management that refuses to use it.
Epic will begin their hyperspace jihad upon your healthcare network. The medical data must flow.
45k is decent for entry level? Maybe in the cheapest places in the US, but that’s only $22/hr for a job that requires a degree. You can make that wage selling legal weed on the west coast.
Yeah very much not decent especially if there is an expectation of unpaid overtime (I don’t know if this is the case but in my experience it’s pretty much universal if you’re salary unless you have a good union)
Unpaid overtime is indeed the expectation
I make less than $30k as a vegan chef hahaha hah
How do you break into this avenue? I’m going full plant based soon and love cooking. I just live in the most meat-based city on the planet.
We have one vegan food truck here but they are barely making enough to stay afloat.
I just started working in a college dining hall, cooked dinner for a bit and then when they needed a new vegan chef i was like hey i’ll do it
Dang so right place at the right time. Are you currently in college and making $30k? That ain’t bad.
No i’m not in college, i don’t feel well compensated, I make 17.50 an hour but i’m out of work and on UI whenever the school is closed which is like 25% of the year
I don’t think i can even get UI over this Christmas break because I was off longer this summer and I think it used up all my “claim”
It’s better than literally starving to death but if the pay is like that it’s not surprising they have a high turnover
I work in this field… hospitals will pay big money if you have clinical credentials and can speak computer. Turnover is high even among that cohort, but that’s because those folks are in demand, and if they’re halfway competent at their job, can go full remote freelance 1099 style. I’m pretty new in the field but I’ve heard of people with nursing degrees making $100/hr off Epic certs. Of course that’s contract work, and the nursing degree is also costly, but damn…
That specific issue can be solved by putting the records on a central server where only the sysadmin has root access, and serving only the necessary files to each user, right? (Although I suppose the upfront costs of a server would scare away management.)
Yeah until Dr. Bozo is annoyed at having to request access and then uses his friendship and or leverage with management into forcing the IT to do dumb shit like giving him the all access pass. Also fuck a server cost, to imply the esteemed Dr. Bozo is anything less than an infallible human being whose access should be limited for standard IT security reasons is akin heresy.
Love reading the fine print for all of the web based medical information shit from hospitals that say things along the lines of, “We demand you give us permission to digitize all documents about your personal medical history but if anything goes wrong we absolutely take no responsibility.”
turnover is high








