Competition among healthcare recruiters to place well-qualified and experienced health information technology executives is fierce.These strategic tips can help.
With ICD-10, health insurance exchanges, and Meaningful Use deadlines bearing down on them, hospitals and health systems are in a bind to recruit and retain the right health IT executives to implement and manage increasingly complex health information systems.
More than half (52%) of hospitals and health system executives say "inadequate staff with expertise" is their top HIT challenges over the next three years, according to the HealthLeaders Media Intelligence Report, Healthcare IT: Tackling Regulatory, Clinical, and Business Needs.
Unfortunately, competition among hospital recruiters to place effective and experienced HIT executives is fierce.
"The CIO position and the IT discipline are going to be vital to the future of healthcare. Patient information ten years ago was on a piece of paper stored on a rack. That information is vital not only to the survival of the organization, but can determine the life or death of the patient," says Derek Kosiorek, a principal consultant at MGMA who specializes in building healthcare IT infrastructures.
This month, the first annual 2013 HIMSS Workforce Survey found that nearly 30% of healthcare organizations have had to place IT initiatives on hold because of staff shortages, and many expressed concern that the delays put quality of patient care at risk and could negatively impact revenue.
1.Seek HIT leaders with strategic vision
"Having an effective CIO is essential to the survival of the organization. It's also important in a competitive space between one healthcare org and another," says Kosiorek.
Twenty-six percent of hospitals and health system executives cited inadequate strategic vision from leadership as one of their top three IT challenges. It was at the highest level in the West from respondents, with 31% citing that as one of their top three challenges.
"That vision is where healthcare is lacking. They either rely on consultants or rely on their EHR vendor to do that vision for them. Even with an external consultant, you're not sure if they're trying to sell you something. They need an internal person in the game," says Kosiorek.
2. Stay competitive on HIT compensation
It doesn't seem that healthcare runs the risk of losing the healthcare CIO talent pool to more competitive markets. Kosiorek says that he's seeing an influx of applicants from other industries looking to move into healthcare because it's seen as the growing industry for IT right now.
That can easily be reflected in a key strategy for retaining CIOs—salary. CIOs and information system directors (ISDs) can expect median compensation increases at more than 7%, according to an MGMA report on pay released this week. Comparatively, the healthcare industry at large expects merit-based raises at 2.5% for 2014, which has remained relatively stagnant for the past two years.
"Healthcare is getting a higher percentage raise because the talent pool is so much smaller," says Kosiorek who has recruited healthcare IT executives for 13 years. "There's a difference between a healthcare IT [person] and an IT person, so the smaller supply creates the higher demand to keep them. The salaries are naturally going to keep going up."
And since 80% of healthcare executives expect their IT budgets to increase in the next three years, you can expect the industry will only become more competitive for healthcare IT executives.
3. HIT Experience trumps education
The trouble is, with healthcare becoming the major player with the capital to spend in the IT market, recruiters are challenged with filtering through many more applicants who try to cross over from other industries into the healthcare space, when their experience does not qualify them to enter the healthcare space.
"Twenty-percent of [healthcare IT executive] applications I see are qualified. Eighty percent aren't useful to pursue. A lot of the applications I see are people that have never worked in a healthcare environment, they've worked in an area that is slightly related to healthcare and they think they're qualified. Or they have healthcare experience and no IT experience," says Kosiorek.
Because this is a relatively new discipline, there aren't that many applicants who have the educational background in that specific area, but unfortunately many resume services and staffing solutions filter applications based on education.
"Experience should far outweigh the education someone started with," says Kosoriek. "Over-reliance on education and certifications could be a detriment and a risk. When HR departments use outsourced resumé collection services, they will get a resume and automatically disqualify a person without a specific degree, and they're eliminating a large pool of candidates without even looking at them."
4. Personality matters
Google Recruiter Mike Junge was interviewed recently about recruiting the right applicants, and he highlighted personality as one of the two or three key defining attributes they're evaluating. "In general, friendliness is very highly sought after. It's hard to overstate how much impact that can have on the hiring process," he said.
In a CIO role, personality is one of the most common underestimated qualities, but it truly defines the CIO role. They are at the board tables and meeting with all of the different departments to tackle problems and create tech solutions, so finding the right personality is key.
"With CIOs, the skill set is so limited, [that] if you find a good one, you really want to keep them. Everybody has a horror story about working with an IT person. They can be rude or not fix the problem, so finding the right person is tricky," says Kosiorek. "You've struck gold if you can find a person that has solid technology accruements and can also communicate the vision where the org needs to go."
Chelsea Rice is an associate editor for HealthLeaders Media.
