Recruiting HIT Workers is Tough

With healthcare information technology deadlines looming, providers are eager to quickly find and hire qualified workers. But numerous forces present challenges to rapid IT staffing. Among them: Healthcare is competing not only within its own industry, but across the economy, for IT workers that are already in short supply.

According to the 2012 College of Healthcare Information Management Executives survey, chief information officers are seeing an 8% increase in the shortage for health IT staff over the last two years. This year, 67% of respondents reported a shortage versus 59% two years ago.

This is good news for IT workers, who can be choosy about where to sign on, but for healthcare CIOs, recruiting and retaining IT staff presents challenges.

IT workers are in high demand across various industries. The competition comes at a particularly tough time for healthcare, where the demands of healthcare reform call for deep IT resources.

According to Chad Daugherty, Managing Director for Information and Technology Services at Randstad Technologies, the firm's IT recruiting business began to shift to healthcare in 2006 and 2007.

"We're experiencing a kind of technology boom in the healthcare space very similar to the dot-com boom," says Daugherty, who has 14 years of experience recruiting for technology positions. "The only difference is the dot-com boom was a bubble—you saw growth into 2000 and 2001, and then it really dropped off. What you're seeing today though is not bubble, this is going to go on for the next 15 to 20 years."

Healthcare is in a race to staff IT workers to meet deadlines on mandates for electronic health records ICD-10 compliance and health insurance exchanges.

"Everyone is racing to meet these deadlines, but the real work is going to be toward optimizing, improving, and enhancing these systems for another 15 to 20 years because they were set up so quickly," says Daugherty.

This shift to more long-term employment in hospitals and health systems, specifically for software development and support roles, currently gives healthcare a competitive edge over other industries recruiting for IT staff.

IT consultants and the IT workforce are finding more job security in the healthcare industry. And their confidence index scores have improved significantly in this space compared to others, says Daugherty.

"Healthcare offers a challenging environment, room for advancement, it pays well, and it addresses a really big factor, and that is stability. And we really utilize that to retain and attract workers for our clients," says Daugherty.

CIOs, though don't seem satisfied with their current staff. According to the upcoming 2013 HealthLeaders Industry Survey, only 14% of executives surveyed find their IT staff "very strong," one of the lowest percentages, while 4% of executives find their IT staff "very weak", the highest percentage of all the staff groups. Daugherty speculates the challenges and difficulty of the jobs in the changing healthcare technology landscape are to blame for those ratings, not the quality of the candidates or hires.

"Implementing these IT systems are difficult challenges in terms of development and support and understanding the workflows of these systems is very challenging," says Daugherty. "Not only that, but the biggest challenge is moving over all of the legacy systems to the new systems."

Finding enough of IT workers quickly enough to meet the federally mandated deadlines is changing the recruiting landscape for IT.

"We've seen that hospitals in the United States have had to adjust their pay scales and salary ranges for consulting services in IT to compete and attract top talent," says Daugherty. "Not only are they competing with an increased demand for IT in the United States generally, but within healthcare hospitals are competing against each other to attract the best talent."

But even standard recruiting channels present shortcomings for providers. Technology staff in healthcare need to be recruited in a completely different way from other hospital staff. Daugherty says he has been privy to many conversations with provider CIOs and CTOs expressing concern that their HR departments are not recruiting the type of skilled IT workers the system needs, quickly enough, so something had to change.

"True headhunting and recruiting has become more valuable," says Daugherty. "A few years ago, a lot of hospitals were trying to use their own HR staff to recruit and hire IT services. But because these people are not on the job boards regularly and they aren't out there in the market, they weren't having a lot of success. Finding resources within healthcare have been more difficult than ever because especially in this industry, people aren't just out on the street looking for jobs. "

Part of the solution to the IT staffing shortage is the clinical staff-to-IT staff transition. Randstad has begun to recruit and train clinical nurses and pharmacists for IT roles because of their understanding of the work flow of a hospital or health system.

Hospitals are also changing the types of candidates they recruit, as well as their training systems, to adjust to the shortage and meet impending deadlines. For example, although millenials and recent graduates have a traditionally high turnover rates, some hospitals are hiring recent graduates for IT and enrolling them in a cross-training platform with highly paid, seasoned IT consultants.

This allows providers to build their own IT staff, trained on their software, from the ground up.   

"Within IT, there's a higher turnover than other industries, even more so over the past few years. So I think that is going to continue to be an issue," says Daugherty. "People are confident and happier within IT jobs, as well as within healthcare jobs. So our hope is that we're going to see more people getting into computer science programs and this shortage of workers will be alleviated a bit."