Internship dispels common misperceptions about health care informatics
Student’s on-the-job experience at an Arizona company shows the importance of pharmacy clinical skills in the health informatics field.
Janel Shoun-Smith | 615.966.7078 |
Sena Seged (’19), a Hendersonville, Tennessee-native working on her dual pharmacy and health care informatics degrees, took the initiative this year to pursue a summer health informatics internship at PEPID, an international health care information company based in Arizona.
PEPID is a web-based clinical decision support company that enables health care professionals to efficiently pinpoint diagnoses, treat diseases and medical conditions, detect harmful drug interactions and allergy sensitivities, accurately dose patients, and provide quality patient education.
Sena Seged
Seged, who obtained her bachelor’s from Lipscomb and moved into pharmacy studies through the university’s 3+1 program, spent a month this past summer at PEPID preparing patient information pamphlets for a PEPID database. She also gave employees of the company an informational presentation on Novel Monoclonal Antibody (mAb) therapy for COVID-19.
Seged worked to assure the quality of PEPID’s drug database by inputting new drug information while also updating and editing existing entries.
Lipscomb is working to finalize a clinical agreement to allow Seged, and any other interested student in the future, to complete an informatics rotation at the company. Such a rotation could help students later secure a health care informatics residency position, said Greg Young, associate dean of experiential education.
“The whole point of the job was understanding the impact of drug information in making accurate patient care decisions and while monitoring patients during drug therapy,” Seged said. “It stretched the way I was thinking about informatics and my clinical decision support skills. It really opened my perspective to what pharmacists are capable of doing regarding patient care.”
The internship experience shattered what Seged believes is a common misperception among young people going into health care informatics: that the field is more about technology and less about a strong clinical foundation.
“It is about applying clinical knowledge to the use of information technology to improve patients’ health outcomes,” Seged said. “I was definitely tested. I saw what I was capable of and how much clinical knowledge I really knew when working on this internship.”
Before entering the College of Pharmacy, Seged both volunteered and interned at the Dispensary of Hope in Nashville, a charitable medication distributor. The experience inspired her to find a way to use her “passion for using technology” to “help in patient care.”
Seged’s long-term career goal is to work for Nashville health company HCA or Amazon’s PillPack pharmacy.