Russ Cucina, 37, lives a double life. For two months of the year, he practices internal medicine, treating patients at the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. The rest of the year, he helps the hospital develop its electronic medical records and other data systems.
As a medical doctor who also has a master’s degree in biomedical informatics, Dr. Cucina has a foot in both worlds — medicine and technology — and can bridge the sometimes daunting gap between them.
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“The health I.T. people run the servers and install software, but the informatics people are the leaders, who interpret and analyze information and work with the clinical staff,” said William Hersh, chairman of the department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at Oregon Health and Science University.
The federal government’s economic stimulus package is dedicating $19 billion to speeding the adoption of electronic health records, so demand for health informatics specialists is skyrocketing. “My rough estimate is that we need about 70,000 health informaticians,” said Don E. Detmer, president and chief executive of the American Medical Informatics Association, a nonprofit industry group.
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