News Feature | July 1, 2015

IT Staff Recruiting Difficult

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Healthcare Information Governance Failing

It is increasingly more difficult for hospitals to find qualified IT staff as technology companies are recruiting the majority of skilled IT workers.

Lack of qualified workers has hospitals struggling to fill IT positions. More specifically, large technology firms are recruiting them with the promise of large salaries hospitals can’t match. Dr. Nicholas Marko, Geisinger's chief data officer said in an article for Modern Healthcare, “Microsoft wants people who are generally bright and good at math. Google wants those people. Amazon wants those people.”

The struggle to find qualified candidates to fill IT positions is not new. In 2013, Health IT Outcomes reported HIT job growth was exceeding expectations and a shortage of qualified applicants was leaving IT positions unfilled.

Hospitals continue to struggle today because many are non-profits and, as Modern Healthcare explains, they cannot compete with Fortune 500 companies. A study of salaries for CIOs at hospitals and other companies reportedly found a $3,000 to $31,000 difference between the two.

iHealth Beat explains the current situation is a result of the predicted “boom” in demand for IT workers. Factors leading to this include:

  • billions of dollars in incentives to transition to electronic health records and the risk of penalties for failing to do so
  • consumers' expectations of intuitive interfaces
  • heightened risk of data breaches
  • the need to use data to cut waste and improve outcomes as part of the health care system's transition to value-base payment models

All of these factors are expected to lead to a 15 to 37 percent increase in health IT jobs by the year 2020.

And healthcare experience is not a requirement for many of these positions – any IT experience will do. “We don't care if they're from healthcare or not,” said Matthew Chambers, Baylor Scott & White's chief information officer. “Sometimes they'll bring new techniques” that were overlooked internally. “We've had some of the best ideas from outside of healthcare.”