Healthcare IT pros face salary gap

Implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), compliance with government regulations, and other healthcare IT initiatives are driving up demand for health IT pros these days. But while their pay inched up last year, health IT professionals' compensation still, for the most part, lags behind IT pros across all industries, according to the InformationWeek 2012 IT Salary Survey. However, while health IT managers earned smaller paychecks than IT managers across other industries, healthcare CIOs fared better than CIOs in general. Healthcare IT staffers also did better than healthcare IT managers, whose increases in base pay and total compensation in 2012 over 2011 were slightly smaller than those seen from 2010 to 2011.