During my undergrad, I frequently used to use his Your Sky app. Was super helpful getting my bearings of the night sky just before my observations. Or to help me see what planets were visible, etc. Happy to see it’s still around.
My birds are much happier when music is playing. And they seem to have preferences over time. Like there are no predators around when the environment around them is noisy.
The difference, imo, is basically in how you define your primary goal. Is it software development or is it specifically informatics?
In my experience (in academia) most informaticians are focused on the data whereas my focus is software development in support of the informaticians’ goals.
Take a look at some Universities that have Biomedical Informatics departments; I started with a University that has such a department. They’ll typically have faculty that have grant-funded projects that require a software component, whether it’s NLP, AI, ML or application development for various purposes (including clinical-use software).
Also look for organizations or companies working with HL7 standards (most recent tech is FHIR (http://hl7.org/fhir/)).
Do you want to become an informatician or do you want to write software in informatics?
I’ve worked in Biomedical Informatics for the past 12 years, but as a software engineer. My original experience was not even close to this field.
You can certainly pursue a degree—yes, likely PhD. Or you can use your SWE background to enter the field. There is a learning curve to understand the domain, but that’s what we do as software types.