Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1dda | Hacker News Reader

I am a working physician (50+) that is currently in training to become an IT professional, preferably working with development of new patient records systems. Being a physician is just not very intellectually challenging, more emotionally challenging, programming is in my mind a real challenge. Any others with experience of changing fields?

View on HN

I trained as a doctor, then family practice for a few years, but since the middle of my studies, I realised my main passion was the more technical aspects. I did a bachelor's in electronics engineering while working 50% as a doctor the first two years, and with the last year dedicated only to studying. I realised a bachelor's would not be enough to get the engineering jobs I desired, so I went back to medicine and started training as a radiologist. There they agreed to fund me doing PhD research 50% of my time, and I am now doing a PhD using AI diagnosing dementia from MRI scans--basically my dream job, while working 50% as a radiologist which also is fun and intellectually very rewarding.

Wow, that truly sounds like a dream job! I discovered neural networks in 2017 and managed to write a simple app to scan dermatological images to classify them, amazing technology! I have worked for one year at a dementia diagnostic centre as a part of my training to become a specialist in family medicine and there is definitely a lot of interesting work to be done. I have also have an interest in radiology, how are you finding the profession so far?

I like it a lot, as I mentioned intellectually rewarding and I feel like most of what I learned at med school is useful. I also quite enjoy the occasional increase in adrenaline when at trauma reception or stroke CT evaluation. Also nice to both be able to work in peace and collaborate with clinicians. And personally I also enjoy keeping up to date on research which is evolving quite rapidly. The negative aspect is mostly what is common to most medical specialities and due to understaffing.

I'm an anesthesiologist. Two years ago I switched to doing 100% software engineering. I had already worked in software, but not full time. There were many reasons. More time with my family was a big one. Work not being intellectually challenging was a another.

Having worked in software before must have made it easier to change profession? I have not so I think I need formal training, I am a programming hobbyist writing in python and did some SQL for databases for research. I guess I need to have really tough problems to solve, when I succeed, there is almost nothing like it, the feeling of accomplishment.

I had already contributed to some open source projects and had also done some fairly large freelance projects. I'm sure this made me more hireable.

I'm not sure I will give up anesthesiology 100%, in the end I'd like to combine and work on "medtech". Currently I work with automotive radar.

Feel free to reach out!

Thank you for the response! I also feel this way, I still like some aspects of being a physician. I think it's just the way some of us are built: we thrive on learning new things, we enjoy challenges and we get bored when stuff gets too easy. Automotive radar sounds exciting as well! I will look for open source projects, it might be a great way to get work experience, thanks for the tip!

> preferably working with development of new patient records systems.

That field is quite a mess. There's a oligopoly of few large vendors with low quality products but high quality politics and sales. Although as a working physicians you're probably familiar at least with the results.

Edit: Further discussion, including EHR system developers, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186252

Having been on the user side could be a major upside for improving the efficiency of the systems, but I'm afraid the business model of EHRs don't really allow for improving the systems much.

EHR is truly a mess which is why I feel compelled, as a somewhat computer-skilled physician, to try to do something. There is a lot of potential to improve EHR but I think we have to start from scratch with a completely new way of thinking. It will be very costly but current solutions aren't working to help the physician, it just adds to the workload.

The business models of EHR's I'm not that familiar with, I will read the thread you provided, thanks! It sounds like you have experience working with EHR development?

> It sounds like you have experience working with EHR development?

Not first hand, but I followed it quite closely when we as activists tried to prevent Finnish healthcare from getting an Epic based system (that turned out to be exactly the disaster we predicted).

Well done! Epic Systems sounds like a nightmare corporation, ruining the lives of health professionals all over the world.

Moved to IT (in a pharma context) after 5 years of experience in hospitals by chance. I like to tell myself that I gra itated towards it since I always wanted to be an engineer. I will not stop being a doctor and I may never quite be an engineer, but I enjoy what I do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com