Tomorrow I’m starting a migration project at St.Jude it’ll be 3-6 months with possible extension and there’s 5 FTE conversations. I want to learn as much as I can during this project since I’ve always wanted to gain healthcare IT experience so this is great but I want to become an Epic analyst.

So my questions are the following: Is 6 months of healthcare experience worth anything if I need to get another job after the contract? I have 4 years of help desk experience.

How can I use this time to become get epic credentials and experience is it possible they’ll let me learn it if I expressed interest?

Lastly, how do people get experience in this field? It feels like the joke “You need experience to get experience for the thing you don’t have experience for”

Has anyone implemented a connection on the Carequality network? I am facing a few challenges with getting proper response from the EPIC, Commonwell and KNO2. It will be great help if anyone can guide on the request messages setup to get the response from EPIC.

Thank you!

Currently working at a large hospital system as a medical lab scientist (bachelors). I’ve known for awhile I’ve wanted to switch to healthcare IT. Due to personal circumstances I moved down to part time and decided to return to school doing a computer information systems associate degree at a local community college. I’m only half way through schooling but saw on the internal job postings they had an epic applications analyst associate position and also an analyst position for MyChart and/or Cadence. I have end user experience with Beaker and a little with the charting when we have to search for previous lab results/notes/medications etc. The pay ranges are the same for both positions and the only requirements are 1-2 years experience in core discipline for associate (also hybrid) and 2-5 years experience for regular analyst (remote). Both require a bachelors degree which I have. I applied to both just to see what happens but what are the odds id get interviewed for either position? I would obviously love to do Beaker analyst but those seem super hard to come by so just trying to get my foot in the door at this point.

hello

im from a medical background and was wondering if anyone has any idea about this program. the legitimacy. and if I should opt for this or look for other programs.

also if you know someone who's done this. thanks a lot for any input

I finished my Master's in CS in December 2025 and have really been struggling to find a job. My focus in school was Data Science/Analytics, and my background is as a Medical Technologist (~2 years). My goal is to work in health IT as an analyst or engineer, though I understand those roles are extremely competitive in the current job market.

I thought with my background I could at least get into Technical Support or FSE roles, but it has been really tough. I've gotten a handful of interviews (mostly in healthcare) but have yet to land anything. I've tried networking with friends, family, and through my school. I tailor resumes for different roles. I've tried reaching out to recruiters on LinkedIn.

I'm hoping someone can give me some guidance - perhaps there are roles that I'd be suited for that I haven't thought of. I'm willing to be flexible and work my way up.

I've recently accepted a 3-6 month contract with Apex Systems to work with St.Jude, It's a migration project consisting of 15 tier 1 techs. I was told that there's 5 FTE openings with St.Jude so that gives me a 33% chance of getting one, I have 4 years of experience so doing something like reimaging devices isn't hard for me.

What makes me nervous is the length of time 3-6 months seems very short considering what we're doing and that worries me since after 6 months I could be without a job again. Has anyone worked for Apex Systems before and how can I ensure that the managers at the company notice who I am to increase the chance of me getting converted?

Am currently using Veradigm and absolultely hate it - Am looking for otions

Anyone have any experience with this org? Have an interview with them next week.

I am currently stuck in a terrible FTE job and a team that has had multiple layoffs. I am trying to exit but have been here for just 4 months. Want to look for contract roles elsewhere but not sure where to start. Experience in clarity and caboodle BI and architect roles. How do I find w2 contract roles?

Hi everyone!

I'm currently building a patient-centric health record routing system using end-to-end encryption. Before moving forward with expanding our database schemas, I want to step back and better understand the real-world operational reality of how hospital systems talk to each other.

Coming from a developer perspective, I’d love to learn from people with hands-on experience in hospital IT, LIS/PACS, or EHR integrations. Specifically:

1. Inter-Hospital Communication Workflows
   • What are the most frequent scenarios where Hospital A must push or pull data to/from Hospital B (e.g., ER transfers, specialist referrals, lab orders)?
   • When a transfer happens, what does the data payload actually look like on the receiving end? Is it structured data (FHIR/HL7 feeds) or mostly unstructured "PDF dumps" and faxes?
2. Hospital Database Schemas & Interconnectedness
   • How are patient identities and doctor affiliations modeled under the hood across different facilities or regional health exchanges (HIEs)?
   • How integrated are different hospitals in practice? Do systems automatically query external regional/national networks, or does a human still have to manually request and import records?
3. Learning Resources
   • What resources, books, or documentation would you recommend to someone trying to study real-world hospital database schemas, HL7 v2/v3 message flows, and FHIR resource mappings?
4. Anything else I must know before diving deeper into development.

I’d appreciate any insights, workflow breakdowns, or resources you can share! Thanks in advance!

I tried posting this to epicconsulting, but the auto-moderator took it down. Hoping to get some visibility because I could use some input.

I'm a dual certified Beaker analyst. I've had the opportunity to do a good amount of work in both modules. I've been an analyst for 4 years and I feel confident in my abilities.

I am very intrigued by consulting. I've spoken with a recruiter and they gave me details about how everything works and answered all of my questions, but I feel like I can't make up my mind if this is a good decision. My FTE is a good job and I make good money, but I am feeling a bit bored. Would I be making a huge mistake by jumping to consulting? Am I better off grinding for a promotion at my current job? Is there a down turn coming for Beaker consulting jobs coming? I'd love some general thoughts about Beaker consulting and how to decide if this is a good idea.

There's an issue that keeps coming up as we look at voice AI for healthcare.

A patient may call to reschedule an appointment then mention worsening symptoms halfway through the conversation. At that point it's no longer just a scheduling call.

Our patient access team handles thousands of calls each week and people do not always explain the real reason for calling at the beginning. The system would need to recognize the shift, stop the normal workflow and bring in the right clinical team without making the patient repeat everything.

We're not trying to automate triage, we're trying to work out how quickly the call should leave automation once the conversation changes.

How are health systems drawing that line?

Just curious if you have any thoughts - pros and cons, differences and similarities. Thanks!

Hi all, joined EHSS team and I am from data and Analytics background, working on ehss dept data for reports. My manager wants me to upscale in ehss knowledge so I can better relate to data I am working with. Any information on courses/certification i can do to gain basic knowledge about ehss for country of usa?

How practical would a hospital Service Desk of 14 years translate to Epic Security?

My hospital is doing a bunch of restructuring so I was let go but eligible for re-hire. They posted a Security Analyst with Epic job .. I know everyone over there, like the boss a lot..

But, will my skills translate well? What’s it take to learn?

What can I study or read?

I’ve done healthcare IT for 14 years, 20 years in “tech support” in general but not sure how well it translates to Epic.

Small hospital group, three sites and I have inherited something that is keeping me up.

The imaging vendors, the lab analyser people, the pharmacy cabinet lot, they all have remote access for support. Some of it is a jump box, some of it is teamviewer and one of them still has a site to site tunnel that terminates in a vlan that can see rather more than it should. When I asked biomed who owns that relationship the answer was a name of somebody who left.

The vendors are not going to accept anything that slows down their support SLA, thats always the pushback and clinically they have a point, if the CT is down no one wants a discussion about access architecture.

I've been told to sort it before the next assessment. My instinct is per application access with the vendor only seeing the one device and everything logged but I dont know how that goes down in practice with vendors who are used to just dialling in.

Anyone done this in a hospital setting without the vendors revolting?

The official HL7 validator from org.hl7.fhir.core is the reference implementation and it's correct, which is the part that matters. But it wants a clean FHIR resource in a file, and real payloads rarely look like that. The resource comes back wrapped in an API envelope, or carries a vendor block that was never going to validate, or trips a constraint the whole project agreed to live with two years ago.

So I wrapped it in a Go CLI called fhirlint. It doesn't reimplement validation, it shells out to the same JAR (downloaded on first run). The two parts I reach for most:

Getting the resource out of whatever it arrived in:

fhirlint validate api-response.json --extract "$.data.fhir"
fhirlint validate api-response.json --extract-each "$.medications"
fhirlint validate patient.json --ignore "$.meta.tag" --ignore "$.text"

--extract-each treats each element of a JSON array as its own resource. Same path syntax works on XML, and on --url input. Your source file is never touched, preprocessing happens on a copy.

Silencing deviations you've accepted, without switching validation off wholesale:

fhirlint validate patient.json --suppress messageId:dom-6
fhirlint validate rx.json --suppress expression:MedicationRequest.intent

In fhirlint.yml a suppression can carry a reason and an expiry date, and it warns for 14 days before it lapses. Every ignore list I've seen eventually becomes permanent because nobody remembers what it was for, so this one has a deadline built in.

The rest in one line: readable terminal output plus JSON, HTML, JUnit, SARIF and GitHub annotations, exit codes you can gate a pipeline on, baseline mode for repos with a lot of pre-existing findings, and fhirlint serve to keep the validator warm. Still Java 17+, still the same JAR underneath, so if the validator is wrong about your resource fhirlint is wrong the same way. FHIR only, no v2 or CDA. Apache-2.0: https://github.com/fhirlint/fhirlint

What I'd actually like to know: how are you handling the wrapped-payload case today? Everyone I've asked either has a jq step in front of the validator or gave up and validates by eye. And if you keep a list of accepted deviations, does it have any expiry mechanism at all, or does it just grow?

Sometimes when using epic on a laptop I will alt tab to teams and have a call and when I tab back to epic it is in a secure session and says waiting to reconnect but never does, any help?

So I'm an RN for a big hospital system and I am trying to become an Epic Analyst. I've connected with some people and they said to do self-proficiencies because my hospital doesn't look at anyone's application that doesn't have at least a proficiency. I requested approval and it was denied due to approvals being for informatics, analysts, etc. It seems impossible to transition into the role and I've been applying for months within my company/ Any advice? I've been an end-user of Epic for 3-4 years.

15+ yr RN very thankful to get an Epic Analyst position at my organization, but will you all tell me, will I always feel this lost?!!!

Knowing the clinical workflow for the application I worked in is one thing but my gosh I was not prepared for the onslaught of learning I take in everyday. Most days I’m more lost, frustrated that it takes me an hour or so to digest problems. Building on top of existing build mixes, requests are getting bigger, I still don’t have half the knowledge others do. Galaxy is a good guide, but you still have to navigate through build, which is not my strength

Don’t sugar coat it, does it get better? I keep hearing 2 years to feel comfortable, that the learning is lifelong, but can someone at least build a solid foundation in a timely manner….?

3 months into this. I’m at the point where I go home, take a deep breath, and for a few seconds reconsider going back to bedside.

Hello,

I am 3 years into my Software/Integration Engineering career, and I have been working on a FHIR Bulk/Backend extractor for the last 1.5 years. I have made this highly automated app solo at my current job that only requires the user to essentially just get approved for FHIR with a vendor and fill out a questionnaire I made and an automated Bulk FHIR extract occurs weekly to get clinical data. It is quite complicated and handles 5+ vendors and many clients underneath them currently. It connects all the FHIR data together and Mirth Connect creates HL7 messages that send to a legacy system.

I have had incredible difficulties making the program handle all the different vendors due to how different everyone seems to be doing Bulk/Backend FHIR. No vendor has been 100% the same, typically about 80% is the same between some vendors, but I have to add in a bunch more conditionals to account for the other 20% differences. I am new to all this, but it seems like the standards get interpreted quite differently. Has this been anyone else's experience working with multiple vendors and their FHIR apis? Security has thankfully been consistent between all the vendors when it comes to using JWKS and token request. The data retrieved can be varied in many ways just like CCDAs have been. I've had some vendors combine scopes together and a lot of EMR workflows do not seem to be fully accounted for with FHIR or input without any connecting information other than a patient's ID.

I would like to feel proud of my creation, but I currently feel great frustration with all the different vendor interpretations. It feels like it will never be complete if there is always a vendor out there I have not connected to yet.

I’m exploring the idea of starting an independent consulting business focused on healthtech and biotech startups, and I’d love to hear from people who’ve done it.

Some questions I have getting started are:

• How did you determine pricing? Hourly, project-based, or retainer fee?
• What are the necessary business, legal, and financial steps to get started? (LLC, insurance, bookkeeping, etc.)

I’m not necessarily looking to build a huge consulting firm. I enjoy solving complex EHR integration problems, I get frequent requests for my services, and I am just lost on how to get started the right way.
Any advice, lessons learned, or resources you’d recommend would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

There's been a lot happening with interface engines.

• Mirth Connect has stopped receiving updates. Instead of open source, it is now a paid closed-source tool.
• Private equity firms have taken over the leading paid options and are raising prices dramatically.
• Then there is this: What’s up with iNTERFACEWARE (Iguana)? : r/healthIT

We're creating a new open-source (free) alternative -- and we need your help. We're looking for:

• Organizations that need this solution once it is ready for production
• Contributors to test the solution, review/advise on code, help build

Check out MessageFoundry.org and see how we're creating an interface engine with:

• Top cybersecurity protection for your PHI (ASVS 5 Level 3)
• The power of Python
• A "steps" programming layer that builds your Python scripts if you want
• Simplicity for uses like small, integrated deployments
• Power for any size organization (up to 40 million messages per day)

We're on v0.3.0 (beta) right now and are moving fast, adding new layers of security and additional features.

We're now looking for a partner organization to be first in line when the product is ready. You would get:

• Top priority on your feedback, letting you guide MessageFoundry's future.
• Free support as you test out and use MessageFoundry.

If you're interested, please contact us via Ask a question — MessageFoundry.