Applying a Computer Science Education in Healthcare IT : A Summer Internship as an Applications Analyst

Abstract

As this was my second summer with Sparrow as an applications analyst, my goals focused around further improving my knowledge of not only my roles and responsibilities, but also of the health system in general and how my work affects patient care. Last summer, I earned my Epic proficiency in the Inpatient – Clinical Documentation settings. This certification was a three-week process and took up almost half of my summer between the training courses, projects, and proctored exams. Because of this and COVID-19 shortening the internship experience, I was not able to finish some of my projects. Towards the end of that summer, I focused solely on taking short ticket requests so I would not leave work behind for my coworkers. This summer, my number one priority was to take on larger projects and be able to get them to production before I left in August. To me it did not matter what project I was on as they all were going to be a learning experience, but I wanted the satisfaction of seeing a project from beginning talks to being moved to the production environment. My second goal was to get to know the health system as whole better, especially getting to go see how my work affects the different departments and service areas included in the hospital. Being on the inpatient team, we cover all work relating to hospitalizations, so being able to tour the hospital and shadow clinicians was a goal of mine to better understand how I can best improve their workflows. Being able to meet them in person and take any questions or concerns is something my team did before COVID-19, so I was hoping to be able to do that with the lessening of restrictions. Finally, I wanted to show myself that although this job is not what people originally expect from a computer science major, I could still apply all my skills from my education and learn some more to help me in my final year at Kalamazoo.