Talent Shortage in Healthcare IT: Three real-world solutions to solving the problem.

How do you find and retain top HIT talent?

There are countless stories about the current HIT skills shortage crisis, not only in informatics, but in other specialized areas of IT as well. I’ve written a few of them myself.

We’ve seen informatics baccalaureate programs pop up to help meet the expected demand. There’s only one problem: How will the healthcare industry get 50,000 new workers through a four-year program, in a partial-handful of schools, in the next two years, to address the incentivized program needs of HCOs in time for meaningful use, ICD-10, and HITECH?

The short answer is that they won’t. Besides, HCOs want experienced technical clinicians, not grads they have to train on their systems, their culture, and at their expense.

Many resourcing professionals and healthcare industry experts talk about what HCOs need to do to recruit, hire and retain top talent. My company is not immune to engaging in such activity.

I think we all know there is a fight for the top talent in HIT. I think we’re all aware of what we need to do to get the best of the best: Higher pay than the competition, an engaging work environment, a culture where life/work balance is actually balanced, great benefits, continuing education, and interesting projects. My staff and I are in the trenches every day fighting the battle. I am likely not telling any CMIOs or private practices anything they don’t already know; at least the ones who are actively involved in getting ready for the changes.

Here’s what I don’t understand: No one is taking steps to address the shortage; not the HCOs, not the doctors, not the technical resourcing industry. The only solution I’ve seen is to grant more H1B Visas.

Here are three ways I think we can address the shortage quickly and domestically (or at least more quickly than waiting for those four-year grads to come and save us.)

1. Train experienced HIT professionals in clinical skills and terms they need to know now. That’s right I brought up the ‘T’ word. Just as C# developers are a good fit for mobile apps work, there are plenty of hard working, talented HIT professionals out there right now that can do 90% of what any HCO might need them to do from a technical standpoint. They have not gone to medical school. They know the language of healthcare IT already. They need clinical training. Community colleges offer training in nursing and other specialized healthcare fields.
   
   How about a curriculum to help get this crowd to a comfort level your HCO is comfortable with? Which person would you rather have running your critical projects; a four-year graduate or a seasoned manager with the added clinical knowledge? This idea brings me to my next point.


2. HCOs need to partner with educators to develop curricula. Plain and simple; educators will never know what HCOs want employees to know unless HCOs tell them. Colleges can guess using job descriptions and industry trends. Unless HCOs provide educators with exact specifications they want IT staff to know, they’re still likely going to see candidates that can give them only 95% of what they want and need. My recommendation is for HCOs to reach out to local colleges to see if they might be of assistance in developing an informatics curriculum for experienced professionals.


3. Treat the entire HIT staff currently employed with respect and offer incentives to stay. I know as a staffing professional this one makes my job harder if the first two solutions fall on deaf ears. If you treat your employees and contingent workforce as if they are gold rather than hired hands who you’ll lose to attrition, assimilate them into the culture of your HCO, and make them a true part of the healthcare process; you will find that not only do they want to stay, they’ll want to help improve the organization. Training, top benefits, challenging projects and work/life balance for your entire HIT staff, not just top recruits, will pay great dividends down the road.

In times like these, it’s hard to turn around without another story popping up about a skills shortage in any industry, let alone the highly specialized HIT and informatics realm. It’s even harder to find someone willing to offer up solutions.

These are mine.

I’d love to hear your ideas and solutions.  

Finding the best technical employees: It’s less about who and more about training.

I was recently reading an article about informatics Baccalaureate programs that are emerging to help meet current and future demands of HCO’s and insurers with highly specific IT program needs. The story sparked a different, yet simple, idea to solving the problem of IT skill shortages in my mind.

How is your company dealing with the IT skills shortage?

My company works in both the engineering and technical sectors. The demand for engineers is high as baby boomers begin to retire and due to the fact that many members of the gen X, Millennial and Z workforce opted for careers in information technology as it was seen as a more lucrative path to follow.

The same can be said for certain sectors of IT today. Healthcare IT and mobile app developers have a unique shortage of skilled professionals on their hands because technologies are literally emerging every day.

We have very competent, very talented system admins, QA professionals, and programmers out in the job market and we still have industries telling us, as a staffing firm, that there is a shortage of available, qualified IT talent. They’re right; a shortage exists and they may be partly to blame.

Just as with engineering, the IT sector has a number of quality candidates in the marketplace actively seeking work, whether it’s for contract or long term positions. Yet there are still many capable, sometimes brilliant IT minds that go unemployed, underemployed or under-engaged in their work because they do not meet a niche skill set on a sheet of paper.

Obviously these professionals have an aptitude for learning new systems. After all, they are professionals in an industry where change is the norm.

So what’s the answer?

It’s simple: Training.

Many businesses have the mindset that IT pros should get the training on their own because they’ll probably jump ship before any sort of ROI is realized. I think the opposite is true; offer the training and you’ll retain your talent. Also, without input from business, how is an IT pro supposed to know what type of specialized training to invest in, if the specialized training even exists?

We have to get business, professionals, colleges and K-12 systems together to come up with a plan to develop our future workforce.  In the meantime, business can do a lot to help itself to a bumper crop of IT professionals if they put some resources toward training on new skill sets.

For example, we’re in the midst of developing a program plan to bring businesses together with trainers and mainstream programming professionals. Businesses tell us they need mobile app professionals now because mobile device use and available apps are increasing at an exponential rate. They also tell us there is a very distinct skill shortage. Training companies need customers. The programmers, with years of demonstrated success in platforms closely related to mobile app development (Java, C++, etc), get to learn a new, in-demand skill set to which they can apply their years of experience in the logic of programming.

A college grad can be great. But nothing can replace those years of experience backing the seasoned IT pros.

If you or your company seem to be wondering how you're going to deal with the skills shortage, the answer might be as simple as providing IT training.