The Health IT Pro Shortage: Why It’s Happening and How to Survive It

Technology has always been a part of healthcare. In the early days, healthcare technologies were simple tools, like the stethoscope, which doctors have been using for almost 200 years to monitor patients’ hearts. Nowadays, healthcare technologies include much more advanced tools, such as defibrillator vests that can monitor patients for irregular heartbeats and even deliver life-saving corrective measures remotely if needed.

More than any other technologies, healthcare organizations depend on information technology (IT) systems. They use IT systems to run their businesses and help them manage patient care and outcomes. But Ryan P. McConnell, Vice President of Sales at US East, notes that healthcare organizations are struggling with implementing more advanced IT solutions for several reasons, including not being able to find the people needed to implement and maintain those solutions.

The crunch to implement advanced IT solutions

McConnell explains that three major drivers are propelling healthcare organizations to implement advanced IT solutions:

• Mandates — Besides the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other regulatory mandates, technology-specific mandates are part of the healthcare landscape. For example, the mandate to move to electronic health records (EHRs) is driving many healthcare providers with Medicare and Medicaid patients to implement an EHR system, especially since they’ll be subject to penalties starting in 2015 if they don’t comply.
• Business needs — According to an article in Health Information Science and Systems Journal, the volume of data generated around healthcare is astronomical: Reports say that by 2011, the U.S. healthcare system alone had generated 150 exabytes of data. Thus,it’s paramount that healthcare organizations use technologies that let them effectively and securely store, manage, and use that data.For example, business intelligence reports are often used to drive business decisions, but getting those reports with traditional systems traditionally took weeks and had to go through a highly technical extraction process by the IT department. Fortunately, technological advances now enable reports to be generated in real-time by users themselves. This ease of access to business intelligence enables better, faster decisions to respond to rapidly changing business needs.
• Patient outcomes — The desire to provide high-quality care is driving some healthcare organizations to implement advanced IT solutions. For example, some healthcare organizations have implemented picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) to store digital images and other types of medical records so that they can be easily retrieved and viewed when necessary.“Let’s say you’re skiing down a mountain and you break your leg,” explains McConnell. “Then, eight years later, you break the same leg again while skiing. Using PACS, the doctor will be able to pull up the x-ray of your first break and see if you broke your leg in the same spot.”

Although advanced IT solutions such as PACS are beneficial, implementing them can be complex because they require sophisticated systems for gathering, storing, securing, and retrieving data. As a result, many healthcare organizations are slow to implement them. Equally challenging is finding health IT pros to not only implement the advanced IT solutions, but also maintain them.

Lack of health IT pros

As healthcare organizations strive to catch up in implementing advanced IT solutions, they are running into a major hurdle: the lack of available IT experts. According to a recent PwC report on health IT staffing, 75% of healthcare providers are currently seeking IT pros.

“What’s happening is that we don’t have enough people graduating on a yearly basis in the technologies needed to handle the mandates that are coming from the regulatory side, let alone the healthcare side,” explains McConnell. This is made more difficult by the fact that specialized solutions such as PACS require not only a general IT background, but also hands-on experience in working with the solutions.

Compounding the problem even further is that most health organizations are part of a larger healthcare system. For example, a healthcare system might include numerous clinics and hospitals across a region. “It’s hard enough to staff one hospital, let alone 30, 50, or 100 of them,” notes McConnell.

The shortage of health IT pros is affecting not only healthcare organizations, but also related industries. Healthcare providers, health insurers, and drug and medical device companies all have similar IT staffing needs, which is leading to intense competition for the same limited number of health IT pros, according to the PwC report.

How to deal with the shortage

Fortunately, there are ways to deal with health IT pro shortage. In the short term, McConnell recommends working with a managed staffing provider that has experience in healthcare but connections in IT. “It’s surprising how many healthcare organizations put a nurse in charge of hiring IT staff,” notes McConnell. “A nurse might be good at hiring other nurses, but when you have a nurse trying to find a system administrator, it can be pretty tough.”

In the long term, McConnell suggests that healthcare organizations keep on top of technology. “Technology changes every day, especially in the healthcare world. Staying abreast of the changes is a great way for healthcare organizations to stay ahead of the curve instead of playing catch-up all the time.”

So, instead of putting off updates and being among the last to adopt new IT solutions, healthcare organizations should incorporate them as they come out. That way, the existing IT staff can keep up with the updates and there’s ample time to find an IT specialist to implement a new technology if needed.

[cta]How will you handle your health IT implementation and staffing challenges? The experts at US East can help. Contact US East at info@useastusa.com or by phone at 212-840-3444. Or visit our website.[/cta]