With all the new money flowing into health IT, particularly with the $35 billion or so in federal money (a net $19 billion after accounting for expected efficiency savings) for electronic health records, someone's going to have to build, install, deploy and train people to use the systems, right? Studies estimate that there was a need for 10,000 to 15,000 new health IT professionals nationwide, but those were conducted before the enactment of the federal stimulus back in February. So there's clearly a huge demand for a health IT workforce, Health Leaders Media reports.
More recently, the an American Hospital Association survey found that 25 percent of responding organizations are shorthanded when it comes to IT staff and expertise. However, the economic downturn that has left so many talented IT professionals unemployed could provide an unprecedented opportunity for healthcare. "We have to figure out a strategy to take IT professionals from other disciplines and orient them to healthcare, and then look at the educational system and the places where they are training people who are specializing in healthcare issues to beginning to look at healthcare IT as a piece of the curriculum," says AHA spokesman Rick Wade.
While these seasoned IT pros can be of immediate help in building secure infrastructure, they will have to be trained for the unique needs of healthcare. "It's all about understanding clinical business processes," says Alex Rodriguez, CIO of St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Edgewood, Ky. "That is the separation-being able to have the communication skills to dive into how the business processes work, the communication skills and the thinking skills to determine how the new technology applications are going to be used," he explains to Health Leaders.
While the increased demand could drive up salaries, Rodriguez says people are looking for professional growth and stability in these trying times, so hospitals may not have to break the bank when augmenting their health IT staff.
For more on the staffing implications of the stimulus:
- take a look at this Health Leaders Media storyRelated Articles:
Blumenthal: Conversion to EMR will create 50,000 new HIM jobs
Economic woes or not, it's full speed ahead for AHIMA '09
Many more HIT pros needed as EMRs roll out
Musings on HIT, health reform message management and the twenty-second amendment...
Health IT is not getting the attention in needs from the senior White House officials and it must be elevated to a central issue during the next phase in the legislative process to pass health reform - The Senate. Health IT has always been the most directly attractive core element of the president's plan, but it has been missing from the fundamental arguments made directly to the American people, a critical error in strategy as it may be the only idea with little resistance on either side of the aisle. Not only is health information technology politically popular, its also one of the very few threads of the larger and infinitely more complex health reform debate that nearly every consumer can understand at a high level.
'Connected Care' and 'Telemedicine' provide the most obvious opportunity to create an emotional investment among voters in the "meat and potatoes" of how Obama's reform initiative will accelerate the modernization medical business. Rahm would be wise to shift debate whenever possible on Sunday circuit away from the billion dollar price tags that currently dominates the discussion and onto the opportunities available for jobs, higher quality health care, and a "smarter" society - steal it from IBM's most recent commercials if you must.
If voters believe that a plan exists that would achieve hyper-saturation of new bioinformatics-driven hardware and software products for consumers - mobile hardware and software needed to facilitate telemedicine services at the level of individual practices and regional health systems - re-election is a slam dunk and the twenty-second amendment (Presidential Term-Limits) could be justifiably revisited. While a lifetime of Barack is a nausating thought, the twenty-second amendment was a mistake and a strong argument could be made that it has prevented the most qualified man in America from re-entering public service - Bill Clinton. Without any legitimate reasoning as to why ambition and uncharacteristic success at a young age should somehow deprive great leaders from leading. Nobody benefits from suppression of genius under any circumstances.
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