Informatics and Healthcare Skill Sets

Healthcare Workers: Personality Type and Informatics

One of the greatest challenges of ensuring healthcare workers are educated in informatics is the likely clash of different personality types needed in both disciplines of health and IT. Healthcare workers are ultimately concerned with helping others. Informatics, on the other hand, is a technological discipline, interested in classifying, retrieving, and storing information. Information processing is the essence of informatics, and an effective database can be very useful in terms of facilitating accurate, safe care (Baker, et al., 2016). These two personality types are likely to be quite different according to standard personality measures such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (Terry, 2020). Understanding how the information might be used by a healthcare professional can thus be very useful, but the types of satisfaction offered by the IT profession is not necessarily the hands-on satisfaction offered by working directly in healthcare itself.

Healthcare informatics thus requires a unique blend of a passion for patients and healthcare with a passion for the technical aspects of computers and data storage. Additionally, on a global level, legal issues regarding privacy concerns about the release of information, different institutional policies, as well as different educational requirements (along with terminology and language) can make it difficult to create seamless, fluent systems that enable knowledge to be effortlessly shared virtually, which is ultimately the goal of informatics. “The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them’” (Genesis 11:6). Having the same language of technology as well as medical care can indeed accomplish much, although it is also essential to retain the core, unique perspectives of different disciplines to honor the value placed upon the unique and human in healthcare.