IT Subject Matter Specialist

The IT Subject Matter Specialist provides highly specialized domain expertise in health informatics, clinical terminologies, and medical vocabulary systems. This key personnel role is critical to the National Library of Medicine’s ongoing technical integration and systems modernization efforts. The ideal candidate will serve as the technical authority bridging the gap between clinical data concepts and modern IT infrastructure, ensuring that highly complex medical datasets are accurately maintained, integrated, and scaled for federal health initiatives.

Core Responsibilities

• Technical Guidance & Modernization: Lead the technical integration, architectural modernization, and cloud transition strategies for NLM’s foundational health datasets and vocabulary systems.

• Terminology Systems Management: Serve as the primary technical expert for the management, distribution, and API integration of key NLM systems, including, + Quality Measures Integration: Guide the technical implementation and mapping for Electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs) and Digital Quality Measures (dQMs).

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with software engineers, cloud architects, clinical informaticians, and federal stakeholders to translate clinical vocabulary requirements into robust IT solutions.

• Standards Compliance: Ensure all modernization efforts adhere to federal health IT standards, data interoperability protocols (e.g., HL7, FHIR), and NLM best practices.

• Strategic Roadmapping: Evaluate existing legacy systems and recommend advanced architectures (such as microservices or specialized cloud-native databases) to improve the performance, searchability, and reliability of NLM datasets.

• Domain Expertise: Deep foundational knowledge of clinical terminologies, medical vocabularies, and health data ontology mapping (including SNOMED CT, LOINC, and ICD-10 in addition to the NLM-specific datasets).

• IT & Systems Architecture: Strong background in enterprise IT modernization, API design, and data pipeline integration for large-scale health systems.

• Data Interoperability: Proven experience working with health data exchange standards, specifically HL7 FHIR, and understanding how standardized vocabularies are consumed by electronic health records (EHRs).

• Problem Solving: Ability to troubleshoot complex data integration issues between disparate medical vocabulary databases.

• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex informatics concepts to both highly technical IT teams and non-technical stakeholders.

Education & Experience

Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in Health IT, Clinical Informatics, or Systems Architecture, with specific hands-on experience dealing with NLM datasets (UMLS, RxNorm, MeSH).

Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Health Informatics, Computer Science, Information Systems, Bio-informatics, or a related discipline.