I’ve worked in Biomedical Informatics for the past 12 years, but as a software engineer. My original experience was not even close to this field.
You can certainly pursue a degree—yes, likely PhD. Or you can use your SWE background to enter the field. There is a learning curve to understand the domain, but that’s what we do as software types.
How did you find your job? What kinds of companies hire roles like that? I looked at a few pharma companies (in Canada) and have seen very few roles that seem like they would hire software engineers.
In my experience (in academia) most informaticians are focused on the data whereas my focus is software development in support of the informaticians’ goals.
Take a look at some Universities that have Biomedical Informatics departments; I started with a University that has such a department. They’ll typically have faculty that have grant-funded projects that require a software component, whether it’s NLP, AI, ML or application development for various purposes (including clinical-use software).
Also look for organizations or companies working with HL7 standards (most recent tech is FHIR (http://hl7.org/fhir/)).
I did previously interview at a FHIR related place a few years ago, but it seemed to be quite far off from the medical or biological side of things, more about billing and administration.