Nursing Informatics Salary – A Look At Informatics Salaries Across The Country
In my previous post, I talked about the reality of nursing informatics salaries based on the survey released by the HIMSS blog.
My basic argument is that those average salaries they display are way too high based on my own personal experience.
For a more realistic ‘survey,’ I gathered my own data from cities I selected from salary.com, and created the chart below:
To obtain the chart above, I used the following data from salary.com.
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I did a search for nursing informatics, and the closest role that turned up was Clinical Informatics Coordinator, which the site defines as:
Responsible for the implementation and utilization of information systems required for patient care initiatives. Evaluates applications or vendors to best meet the needs of the organization. Provides technical training and support to end users. Requires certification as a registered nurse (RN).
That is a very close and concise description of most nursing informatics roles; I then plugged a city and got the results in the data shown above. Based on my past experience working and interviewing for jobs across different cities in the USA, I must say that this data is surprisingly accurate. I also talked to colleagues who work in some of these cities and they concurred. You can also go to salary.com and pull the same data for your own specific area.
Since one of the queries I get is, what state pays the most, I also pulled the data solely on the data I collected and here are those results:
Out of curiosity, I also sorted the data by lowest paying city:
You should note that the average salaries are in the range of 70k as I already wrote in a previous post. And some of these cities go even below this average, which only busts the myth that nursing informatics salaries start in the 90k range, as many entry level candidates seem to erroneously believe.
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Chris Smith works as a clinical analyst consultant with 9 years of experience working in the nursing informatics field. He started this blog to help others learn more about nursing informatics because he got tired of reading a lot of misinformation about this field on the web. You can connect with Chris on Google+
6 Responses to Nursing Informatics Salary – A Look At Informatics Salaries Across The Country
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Does the salary ranges include those who have a MS in Nursing Informatics along with a certification? Thank you.
The survey for these specific ranges didn’t specify if there was a difference between bachelors and a certification. Thanks for reading the blog.
Do you think having an MS makes that much of a different in informatics salary? I would honestly think that clinical experience and your your IT experience would make more of a difference.
I personally have not seen that much of difference, unless the job requires an MS degree and those jobs tend to be in the managerial level. If you don’t have an MS degree for those type of jobs, then most times you can’t even apply for the job. But I know that for many jobs out there they are specifically looking for experienced candidates and is an added bonus when they can find a nurse that has this experience.
I have plenty of friends that are non clinical, but have tons of experience implementing projects in many hospitals, and since they are pretty good at implementing their applications, they are getting paid just as much as a nurse in that similar position would. So even having a nursing degree doesn’t make much of a difference sometimes. Obviously, many jobs in hospitals require a nursing degree, but at the same time, plenty of jobs that are just looking for experienced candidates that have implemented an application.
Also, if you look at vendors, many of them hire a majority of non nursing graduates and these people are out there earning just as much, if not more (because of skill and experience) than many nurses in the informatics field. So I think that your specific experience and background make a difference, unless the job requires you to have that MS degree.
I am working as an application specialist for an hospital. I want to got to back to school for my masters in Health Informatics. Do you think it a good field to be in and does my job title would count as experience. The application I work with is electronic patient folder.
Yes, absolutely. Informatics is an excellent field to be in. As far as your job title, assuming that it involves any if not all of the project phases, then it would count as experience.