Federal stimulus funding is driving electronic medical record implementations, and state and local governments are increasing their health IT budgets, according to recent reports.
Those drivers will make healthcare IT workers highly attractive in this down economy, but the big unanswered question is: What is the right expertise required to get physician offices up and running?
"Whatever it is, we're going to need more of it," said William Hersh, MD, professor and chair of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at the Oregon Health & Science University in Salem. "It may be physician offices need even more expertise (than hospitals)," he said.
If that's the case, it may be difficult to fill the current demand for health IT workers. In a workforce research paper he prepared in April 2008, using the Health Information Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) Analytics Database and EMR Adoption Model, Hersh pointed out that tens of thousands of IT professionals will be needed for hospitals. And this projection pre-dated the federal stimulus incentives.
Hersh found that the number of IT staff hired depended upon the level, or stage, of EMR adoption. The lowest level (Stage 0) required 0.082 full-time employee (FTE) per bed, while Stage 4 adoption required 0.210 FTE per bed, for example. "To move the entire country to higher levels of adoption (Stage 4) will require an additional 40,784 IT professionals," he reported.
Stage 4 of the EMR Adoption Model will be a target for many healthcare systems and physician groups because its capabilities - clinical decision support and CPOE - meet the "meaningful use" criteria for health IT, as outlined by the federal government.
IT workers who have been laid off in other industries are prime candidates for retraining for the healthcare industry and can help meet the demand, he said. Hersh pointed out that the expertise required for health IT adoption "runs the whole gamut" from technical to non-technical, such as practice redesign, which is just as critical an expertise to physician groups as the traditional IT worker.
