Talking nursing informatics with Brittney Wilson also known online as “The Nerdy Nurse.” Brittney is a community manager for Next Wave Connect and has a background in clinical informatics. Brittney is also the author of The Nerdy Nurse’s Guide to Technology and she blogs about nursing, technology, healthcare, parenting and various lifestyle topics on thenerdynurse.com. Here’s that interview.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Brittney, welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here joining us as our Get-to-Know nurse this month. We’re talking nursing informatics and we’ll get all into that in just a second. But I always ask our nurses the first question, which is why did you, Brittney, want to become a nurse?

Brittney Wilson: First of all, thank you so much for having me. The second of all is why did I want to become a nurse? My story for this is a little bit funny. It’s not the traditional I used to put Band-Aids on my baby dolls and would be the first to help when I was a little kid. I would love to be able to tell that story. The real truth is that I wanted to get into a profession that helps people and make people happy. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a country star. In fact, I just published a video on my Facebook channel that I may or may not regret that shows me winning a talent show when I was about 15 years old by yodeling to a LeAnn Rimes song. When I grew up and realized that not everybody can hit the lottery again the music industry, because that’s pretty much like hitting the lottery, I decided I wanted to be a plastic surgeon because, just like country stars, they make people happy and they bring quality of life rather than just quantity of life. At the time, I was naïve and thought that the only area of healthcare or medicine that dealt with quality of life was plastic surgery and how wrong I was. However, I wasn’t exactly sure that I wanted to get myself into 12 years of medical school and mountains and mountains of debt. That’s something I wasn’t 100% convinced that would be up for, I mean, do you really know you can handle blood in surgery and breaking bones and all that kind of stuff until you’ve actually done it or, at least, had some hand in the medical field? So I stopped off along the way to nursing school to see if I could cut it with all this healthcare stuff. It was very interesting. I didn’t realize that I wanted to be a nurse until at least six months after I was a nurse. But that was when I quickly discovered that nursing was truly the area of healthcare that dealt with body, mind and soul, and holistically the quality of life. It wasn’t about diagnosing somebody or stitching somebody up. It was about making sure that their pain was managed and that if they were dying, they did so with dignity and with the comfort of their family. So that story is a little bit complexed. But in short, I didn’t know I wanted to be a nurse until six months after I was a nurse and then it just kind of stuck.

Jamie:                   Awesome. It’s interesting. Everybody that is online and maybe knows you through your online persona as The Nerdy Nurse knows that you’re heavily involved with nursing informatics. But what was your career path like to get into nursing informatics? You didn’t just jump right for nursing school into that. You had some clinical application time at the bedside too, correct?

Brittney:               Absolutely. In fact, it’s almost unheard of to go directly into informatics. Typically, the career path requires at least three to five years of clinical experience and even then it’s a real challenge. Mostly, informatics nurses you’ll meet are in their mid-40s because they want people who have a dynamic clinical skill set. However,