Becoming a health informatics specialist is a little bit like being on the edge of a precipice overlooking a valley of gold. When it comes down to it, there are a plethora of opportunities that abound in the informatics field, especially in the healthcare industry. As a healthcare informatics specialist, you will not only have the opportunity make a high salary, but you can also be working on something you actually love working on. There is nothing like pouring your heart and soul into something and seeing all that work make a difference. In other fields, most people work for a lifetime and don’t have much to show for it. Here are some different career options in health informatics.

One of the most popular careers you can get with a health informatics masters is a job as a clinical informaticist. A clinical informaticist will usually be working in the laboratory of a hospital or clinic. It will be your job to basically compute and to find smart ways to crunch data. In a big medial study, there is a lot of data to crunch. An informaticist won’t be crunching the numbers, per se, but he or she may be building programs to better synthesize information.

Another great career for someone with an informatics degree is an information security officer, or an ISO. In this career, it will be your job to build security networks for hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities. When it comes down to it, a hospital or clinic has a lot of private and confidential information. Once that information goes online or in the cloud, it can become instantly vulnerable to theft. So, it will be your job as an informatics security officer to protect the facility against these breaches information. Not only are you protecting the hospital or clinic, but you are also protecting the hospital as well.

Next, you could also work your way up to become a chief information officer. This is one of the highest careers in the healthcare field and it comes with one of the highest salaries. As a chief information officer, or CIO, it will be your job to take over a hospital or healthcare facility’s digital platform and find ways to make sure information is transferred, stored efficiently and seamlessly. In this position, you will have a lot of responsibility, because it could be your expertise that leads a certain healthcare facility to a path of success – not failure.

Lastly, you could work as a private contractor in the informatics field. As a contracting informatics specialist, you will have free range to work with a number of businesses and healthcare providers to digitize platforms, build algorithms, and solutions to incredibly complicated problems that may be plaguing the healthcare industry. At the end of the day, becoming a free agent in the informatics world can offer you the ability to make more money and to be a master of your own schedule. Sometimes having this freedom and the ability to work on things at your own pace is better than working within the confines of deadlines and an office environment – it all depends on your personal interests and what your vision is for an ideal working environment.