I’ve added “Careers” to the Academic forum as a place where people can post questions about getting into a career in digital health.
So this topic kicks things off - how did you get started in your digital health career? For me, I started off with developing my own websites and helping my hospital with projects like using iPaq PDAs and a surgical notes system when I was a junior doctor in the UK.
Hello Chris and readers,
My journey in Digital Health began outside the healthcare realm. With a longstanding passion for IT, I delved into coding, built my own websites, and wrote various guides, initially unrelated to health, even before pursuing a career in Nursing. Upon becoming a registered nurse, my interest in IT persisted as a hobby.
When my current employer sought a Clinical Application Specialist, I realised this position encapsulated my dream job, combining my two greatest passions—IT and nursing. Now, I have the incredible opportunity to merge both worlds, making a significant impact for both patients and colleagues alike.
Thanks for sharing your story Elena!
Great topic and we need more stories to inspire the next generation of health informaticians!
My advice, follow your passion with a purpose. Clinical was more started as a hobby, with research and solving complex problems being my skillset. I started off indexing health records in a hospital basement over an evening to midnight shift, while studying biomedical sciences. When you spend a year looking at how health records are created, indexed and filed, and you work on streamlining how information could be used, you are motivated to do something about it.
43 roles/positions later, you live and breath digital health 
Implementing a PAS (webPAS) in CCDHB was my first…
It took me a long time to come back to IT after that experience.
Jon
After doing a degree in Physics the only thing I was certain of was that computers hate people. Came to NZ/A and there were virtually no jobs in Medical Physics. Reevaluated my CV and saw that my jobs in Medical Physics had included an awful lot of software development and data analysis. Got a job a National Women’s Running the AMSIS information system learner a lot about paradox and that Midwives and Nurses are different. Moved to Dunedin and a job came up as part of the team developing and running the diploma in health informatics. Got into HINZ and academia. EHealth is all about working with different groups of people, asking silly questions and admitting when you don’t know. My career advice is to imagine yourself describing what sort of thing you do in 5 years time - not the specific job, but what you actually spend most of your time thinking about. Often that is “explaining things to people”.
Dave Parry
School of IT Murdoch University
From mobile so a bit more erratic than normal !
Okay, mine is mildly interesting. Well, I think so.
In 1978—my first year of medical school—I had the option of doing a half-course in programming, or a half-course in sociology. I chose the former, where I started learning Fortran IV.
My Damascus road experience was the revelation “These machines can be taught to think!” But trying this in Fortran wasn’t a heap of fun. So I asked around, and the 3rd year BSc students all said “You gotta learn Lisp”.
I got hold of a copy of the Lisp 1.5 primer, and together with a physics student who had terminal time—like gold on the IBM machines of the day—we learned to speak Lisp. Which in its own way was a revelation.
During the day I learnt Medicine. At night, programming. As the local interactive Lisp was quite crippled, I naïvely decided to write my own Lisp interpreter. Asking around, the BSc students all said “You need to learn IBM/360 Assembly Language.” So I did. I was just starting to get my interpreter working when I lost my terminal access through a humorous and somewhat unfortunate accident. Our Lisp 1.5 ran in interactive mode and this required unlimited time. It also had a GOTO statement.
My friend discovered that you do not say “GOTO HELL” on the top level—as the machine consumed his entire annual allocation of computer time looking for HELL, and the put-upon administrators refused to give him any more.
Miffed, I bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I learned Z80 assembly and wrote an interactive assembler/disassembler. With the help of an electrical engineer (MJ Turner) I built a hardware RR-interval timer that plugged into the back of an Hp cardiotocograph. When PCs arrived, I learned x86 assembly and thence to Pascal (and a Dip. Data.). I wrote accounting packages for anaesthetists, a database for a paediatric ICU, and a full dictation-replacing package for some cardiologists.
When the Web burst on the scene in '94, I learnt HTML. Along the road I became capable at Perl and PHP and SQL and C and JavaScript, with a bit of J and Erlang and Java and C++ and Python and R and so on… Then I started making my own languages.
It was only belatedly that I realised that the most important aspects of programming share a lot with the most important aspects of medicine—and of competent administration: capable standards; the capacity for strategic vision, supported by a properly articulated data schema; understanding change over time, à la Shewhart; embracing continuous quality improvement, à la Deming; a true appreciation of the importance of human factors—and actually listening to people on the floor.*
Quite a journey, in retrospect.
My 2c, Dr Jo.
*Any decade now, we’ll get this all joined up† properly 
† LLMs are just a peripheral part of the solution (and may well hurt as much as they help).