Steven Lewis

I heard through a colleague that the University of Melbourne Graduate Certificate was really good. I signed up straight away … I knew it was an area I was interested in. Digital Health is the future, both in the community and in a healthcare environment.

I’m a Clinical Application Specialist, which means I do education and training, as well as workflow analysis for Philips, a global leader in health technology. I’m about to start a new role as an EMR clinical integration consultant with the Philips TASY EMR team. Philips Tasy EMR is a comprehensive healthcare informatics solution that connects the dots across clinical and non-clinical domains along the healthcare continuum. My new manager is delighted I’ve completed postgraduate study in informatics and digital health, which will assist in the transition with terminologies and raw concepts.

Prior to that I spent about 15 years as a Registered Nurse in various roles in education, management and on-the-floor nursing. Any Registered Nurse enters the profession with views of what it means to care for patients: managing medication and personal care, but this is dwarfed by documentation requirements. It seemed ridiculous that I had to record a new patient’s weight on admission to hospital, then on the fluid balance chart, and then a Daily Weight Chart requested by the doctor. The reduction in duplications like this will be a game changer for nurses, and hopefully take RNs back to the care that they can deliver, not just documenting it.

Digital health has so many applications, from measuring our step count, to helping the pharmacy ordering systems in hospitals be safer, all the way through to collecting lifesaving data. Anything that can help consumers and patients and ultimately keep them safe is why I love working in this space. For me, looking outside the healthcare environment at the vast array of informatics solutions in the community was really pivotal.

My peers on the program came from clinical, IT and other backgrounds, and it was great to leverage experience from such a diverse skillset as well as the forward-thinking content of the course.

The Graduate Certificate has given me so much more confidence. As a nurse in an acute healthcare environment, the patient is at the centre of all decision making. Critically thinking about the technology and information systems in this environment will help me to assist in achieving best-practice patient care.

I hope that with my knowledge of hospital workflows that I can assist customers to design Electronic Medical Records that are fit for purpose and make life easy for the clinicians, prevent the duplication of data entry that is so prevalent in a paper-based documentation system, and ultimately keep patients safe.

Find out more about the Graduate Certificate
in Health Informatics and Digital Health