UW Health surgeon David Schneider on how he got into informatics and digital health

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights David Schneider, a medical informaticist and surgeon at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin. Schneider talked about how he got into informatics, what his job is like on a given day, and the work he does with UW Health’s digital health team.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What does it mean to be a medical informaticist?

A medical informaticist works to improve how we use information to improve health and healthcare. You can have medical informaticists who are of various specialties, like a nurse informaticist, dentist informaticist. I happen to be a surgeon and hold a board certification in clinical informatics. Improving healthcare also means improving the work of healthcare professionals—not just improving patients’ health, but making things easier for physicians, nurses, and all the various healthcare workers.

What kind of information exactly are you dealing with?

Patient information that’s stored in our electronic health record (EHR). A lot of the work we do is just making sure that information is showing up in the right places and that it’s flowing from other sources—whether through referrals or the lab system or radiology—then making sure it’s easy to find and easy to use by clinicians.

What does the day to day of your job look like?

I spend about half my time doing surgery and the other half of my time doing informatics. I also work with our digital health team here. A typical day involves a lot of meetings with the other informaticists, the information services analysts, other clinicians who are struggling with some aspect of the EHR. If we’re rolling out a new patient questionnaire or something like that, I also help lead the project and make sure it’s successful.

You started off as solely a surgeon. How did you get into the informatics side?

I was doing research on using machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve clinical decision-making. I was trying to get more training in that arena, and I ended up meeting our chief medical information officer. They were all getting ready to take the clinical informatics boards, and I just got really interested in that side of informatics, the more applied side. I realized that a lot of the training I was trying to do around informatics was very computational and not really applied. I ended up studying with them for the informatics boards, and then I would hear about the projects they were working on. Eventually I asked if I could apply to get a job working on that side of things for the health system.

You said you work with the digital health team. How did you get into that and what kind of work do you do?

I was one of the medical informaticists for the health system when the pandemic started. Suddenly my clinical practice was completely shut down, and I said to our CMO, “Look, I’m not doing anything; what can I do now to help?” And she’s like, “We need to figure out this telehealth thing, because this needs to happen now.” We had a very fledgling telehealth team; it was about three or four people, so they needed all the help they could get. I joined them and helped launch our first telehealth platform. From there, telehealth became a huge thing, and they needed another medical director, and so I was asked to take on that role.

We have a number of programs related to remote patient monitoring, like monitoring people in the ICU using cameras, and programs where people are monitored at home with various devices to measure their vital signs. It’s a growing area where we’re expanding more and more offerings in what we consider the digital health space.