News Feature | October 17, 2013

HIT Job Growth Exceeds Projections

Source: Health IT Outcomes
Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

A lack of skilled applicants has left the industry looking for employees to fill health IT positions

A study posted to Wiley Online Library, Tracking Labor Demand with Online Job Postings: The Case of Health IT Workers and the HITECH Act, finds, “Growth in the health information technology (health IT) workforce will be necessary for the widespread adoption of electronic health records called for by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

The study drew from “84 million online help wanted postings (to) create a dataset of 434,000 health IT–related job listings from 2007 to 2011 whose descriptions contain key phrases such as ‘electronic health record’ or ‘clinical informatics.’” The authors found that health IT–related job postings have tripled as a share of healthcare job postings since 2007. Further analyses suggests health IT–related job postings accelerated following HITECH and the legislation was associated with an 86 percent increase in monthly postings, or 162,000 additional postings overall.

Health Data Management writes of the study, “About 48 percent of the job growth was due to HITECH, with the remainder due to growth that would have continued at historical trends prior to HITECH. Some other interesting findings for the time period between 2007-2011 included HIT jobs growing from 0.75 percent to nearly 2.5 percent of all healthcare job postings and an approximately four-fold increase in the number of jobs posted.”

The study’s authors also categorized the job listings by responsibility (some jobs had responsibilities in more than one category):

  • system installation, customization, building, debugging, purchasing, or workflow redesign (43 percent)
  • user training (27 percent)
  • system development (22 percent)
  • technical support (21 percent)
  • maintaining of continued technical functionality or providing customer support (21 percent)
  • IT strategy (13 percent)
  • sales (11 percent)
  • research (6 percent)

“It will remain to be seen how strong the job market remains as the HITECH incentives wind down, although HIT will continue to be a cost of doing business in healthcare, especially as the system moves to payment models that require better management and use of data, such as accountable care organizations and primary care/patient-centered medical homes,” writes Health Data Management.

According to EHR Intelligence, “The lack of qualified workers represented a major challenge to organizations looking to bolster their IT teams. While health IT hiring was robust in 2012, there was a shortage of qualified applicants for information technology positions, possibly resulting in a delay for EHR implementations and the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).”

More than 85 percent of healthcare organizations said they hired an IT professional in 2012, but only 13 percent reported any layoffs creating a staffing deficit that has led to “half of respondents (placing) an IT initiative on hold because they could not fully staff the program.” Respondents “admitted that these back-burner projects represented some sort of risk to patient safety or revenue generation.”