I got my degree in IT and worked six years in enterprise IT operations for a large alcohol beverage company in Louisville Kentucky. Some of the things you mentioned in your post started happening… It was the worst time of my life as I didn’t like the people I worked with as they were more back room IT cynical type personalities and a total drag to be around but the more concerning issue was how the hell was I going to fix this.
I was very interested in healthcare and actually had some prerequisites that would apply. Long story short, got a degree in Nuclear Medicine and practiced for a while but ultimately merged my IT background with my clinical background. This opened up other opportunities within medical imaging systems administration otherwise known as PACS Administration. Also work with Epic quite a bit which is the industry standard for EMR. These two areas are the most lucrative within healthcare information technology that usually require a clinical background.
It was actually on free republic where I was lurking about 15, 16 years ago when I was in limbo and came across a thread that was going on about H1B visa‘s and just basically people disenchanted with their IT careers in general. Someone posted that they quit their IT job and went back to radiology school to get their MRI degree and will never have to worry about living with that level of uncertainty again. I was enrolled in human anatomy and physiology along with organic chemistry within the next 10 days!
Did Epic pretty much replace McKesson in most hospitals? Or is the latter still going strong?