Management Students Gain Chance to Learn Healthcare Software

Students at NJIT's Martin Tuchman School of Management are getting a rare opportunity to become trained in medical records software from Epic Systems Corp., the Apple of its field, which experts say is a sure path to a stable and high-paying job in healthcare technology.

Electronic medical records, or EMR, is a $20 billion software industry for organizing every aspect of patient's healthcare experiences, from insurance to communications to the clinical details of care provided — but Epic only certifies employees of hospitals, where administrators are highly selective about who they send to the expensive courses only offered in Wisconsin.

Now, management students will learn some of the basics of Epic through internships at University Hospital here in Newark, and if they do well then the hospital is likely to hire them when positions are available on an Epic certification track, explained Tomas Gregorio, the hospital's chief innovation and technology officer, himself a Martin Tuchman alumnus and former healthcare executive at NJIT-owned New Jersey Innovation Institute.

The first interns are Vandana Kadia, studying for a master's in financial technology, Kevin Katayama, a junior finance major, Shoaib Mohammed, studying for a master's in business analytics, and Segiade Olajuwon, a junior concentrating on management information systems.

They won't work a set number of hours per week. "This is a self-study program. I would like them to be able to attend meetings related to their projects when possible and assist with user acceptance testing as well as integrated testing as needed," Gregorio said.

"The interns will be required to complete a self-paced training program," he continued. "The training program will be conducted via e-learning videos provided by Epic. The total program will take approximately 40 hours to be completed. Upon completion of the training program, the intern will be assigned to a University Hospital Epic analyst. The analyst will assign tasks based on the Epic training program to the intern. The intern will be required to complete these tasks within a set timeframe within our [testing] environment."

I thought it was an interesting opportunity to get to know what's behind the scenes. Maybe I'll discover something I like and have an opportunity to grow into the role.

Katayama learned about the program as a member of the college's student leadership council. He has a unique fondness for learning, in that he serves as a tutor in the college study center. "I've had quite a long history with medical issues myself. I thought it was an interesting opportunity to get to know what's behind the scenes," he said. As a minor in information systems, "Maybe I'll discover something I like and have an opportunity to grow into the role."

Olajuwon, raised in Newark, said she's always been interested in healthcare and knew about Epic because her mother is a nurse and her father is a doctor. "I just think it's really interesting. Over the past few years it's really become such a growing and fast-paced implemented technology. It's used all around the world now," she noted. "Maybe I'm not the one out there hands-on helping the patient, but I am making a system that will help patients in the end. That's pretty fulfilling."

"It opens up the world of what's possible in an industry they otherwise would not have been exposed to," Gregorio said. "I have long used NJIT students to solve healthcare problems over the last 20 years and hope to inspire the next generation of healthcare technology leaders and entrepreneurs."

He intends for the internship to be available long-term and anticipates that future interns will need to keep up with increasingly advanced subjects in healthcare data analytics.

Such topics are already on the mind of Oya Tukel, dean of the college, who said Gregorio approached her with the idea. She and her staff recently implemented a new financial technology major, built a business data observatory and researched the role of digital transformation, all despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This can be an amazing potential skill set for students," noted Tukel. Students can receive credit for the internship if needed, she added.