One thing that I love about this industry is its willingness to collaborate, and I’m not just talking about collaborative care. I’m talking about healthcare IT’s propensity to brainstorm new ideas as the drop of a hat. Put two HIT folks – be they physician, vendor or blogger – in a room, and 20 minutes later you’re going to have a new idea related to care delivery, product development or possible partnership on your hands. It gets even more prolific when editorially minded marketing folks like me are added to the mix.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how even blogs can foster this sort of collaboration. Last month in “Finding an EMR Job Champion,” I chatted with Rich Wicker, HIMS Director at Shore Memorial Hospital in New Jersey, about how this industry can best align recent graduates of HIT certification programs with training and jobs. Some of you may have noticed several comments left on that post by Sean McPhillips, a man of many hats. He is currently an adjunct instructor at Cincinnati State – a community college in the HITECH College Consortia; project manager at the Kentucky Regional Extension Center; and creator of the HITECHWorkforce.com, a free resource to help students enter the HIT work environment.

In his comments, he advocates for a mentor-protégé program: “Students still need some more help finding jobs. What I think needs to happen is a “Mentor/Protégé” model. That is, pairing students with industry professionals who can mentor them into the industry. I’ve passively done that…to success. I think that will work.” He later followed up with the news that he hopes to work with HIMSS, which is developing a similar program, to get this model off the ground.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with McPhillips a bit more about his idea. I was eager to find out just how he plans to jumpstart it:

It seems as if you’ve been kicking this idea around for a while. How did it come about?
Being with the extension center, I’ve mentored a handful of people along the way, and I think there needs to be a more structured process so that students coming out of these [HITECH College Consortia] programs who want to be mentored have a place to go, they know how to get and stay engaged in the process. I think that there is with HIMSS, but I don’t think it’s really been tightly coupled with the workforce development program.

When I spoke with Helen Figge, Senior Director of Career Services at HIMSS, she was really excited to talk with me, and pointed me to HIMSS’ career development page to look around and see what they have out there. I’m thinking of how we can connect [what they’re already doing] into the workforce development program within the overall HITECH project structure, so that we can connect students who come out of these programs with their local HIMSS chapter, which could then pair them up with a mentor that’s in their region. That’s what’s really missing. That’s what’s really necessary to get people plugged into this profession – especially if they’re coming from outside of this profession.

HIMSS does not already have some sort of relationship with the college consortia?
They kind of do, but I don’t think it’s really tightly coupled. I think HIMSS recognizes this, so they’ve been developing their career development program. They’re near completion of a new, entry-level certification called the CSHIMS certification. That is something where you don’t need to have a whole lot of experience in health information technology, but you need to demonstrate some degree of knowledge in subject matter to obtain that certification. That might be a good way to help these students take the next step into the profession, when they’re looking to get a job. That could be part of the whole mentorship program concept.

Isn’t there a double-edged sword to it financially? Wouldn’t students have to become paying members of HIMSS, and then would they have to pay for certification? If they’re looking for jobs, finances might be tighter than usual.
That’s a great point. The question is, what are the costs associated with certification and becoming a member. There is a student membership discount. There’s a cost to certification, obviously, so these are things that are to be considered. That has not escaped me, so that’s going to be part of my brainstorming session. I’m going to meet up with them in Vegas when I go out to HIMSS.

One of the things I want to be able to do is make this attractive for people, particularly students, and if they have to lay out $500 or $1,000, and they’re already unemployed or they’re financially strapped, it becomes not just a double-edged sword, it becomes a disincentive.

I wonder if the vendors couldn’t get involved and offer scholarships.
It’s funny that you mention scholarships because that might be something the local HIMSS chapters can do. I know the Ohio HIMSS chapter used to do a $1,000 scholarship every year for students. So this might be something that the boards or the individual chapters could subsidize.

If you’re in the HITECH workforce development program, maybe HIMSS would be willing to waive membership for one year. That might be something they may be interested in doing.

This is part of the whole brainstorming session that I’m going to try to have over the next month or so. I’ll vet this through HIMSS over the next couple of weeks and hopefully we’ll come up with a good strategy by the end of February. And then we’ll start piloting it in the March timeframe.

I hope to run into McPhillips in Vegas to see how his chat with the HIMSS career development folks is coming along. It’s nice to know that one industry insider’s idea, and subsequent blog comments, might actually create job opportunity in the industry.

I came across an article the other day about “10 of Today’s Hottest Jobs” and was not surprised to learn that five of the cited 10 had something to do with healthcare or IT. We’ve all been told time and again that healthcare reform and its incentivized plans for IT implementations will lead to a greater demand for healthcare information management and IT positions, including the much-coveted EMR implementation specialist. But as we’ve all realized, just because industry demand for these types of positions has risen, that doesn’t mean they are being filled quickly – or at all. The same article alludes to what is happening in the healthcare IT job space right now: “Believe it or not, even with the unemployment rate stubbornly high and many industries reluctant to staff up, there are employers out there who still can’t find enough qualified applicants.”

And there’s the rub. Many healthcare vendors and consulting firms, particularly those involved in healthcare IT implementations, are looking for “qualified applicants,” and completely overlooking the enormous pool of talent that newly graduated job seekers have to offer. This certainly isn’t a new observation, but as America – whose citizens are experiencing unemployment at record levels – sits down tomorrow night to watch President Obama address the nation’s employment situation in front of Congress, it certainly is a timely one.

Let’s take a look at two videos that highlight the employment disconnect between higher education in healthcare IT, and the types of firms that would seem to be hiring new graduates.

In the first, Kelly Patterson from Hinds Community College in Raymond, Mississippi, chats with a local news station about the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Community College Consortia Program, which trains individuals in healthcare IT workforce roles, including EMR implementation.

In the second, employees at Cerner Corp. chat about how happy they are to work at the company, and list many benefits of being a Cerner employee. Most are young – many could be recent college graduates – and seem enthusiastic about their careers.

So if national training programs abound, and vendors seem eager to hire fresh talent, where is the disconnect? Why do statements like the one below seem like a dime a dozen these days?

“Training and certification do not seem to be enough. As in all new fields, experience comes from experience.” – Nachum Greenspan via LinkedIn

EJ Fechenda at HIMSS JobMine gave her two cents on how to bridge this employment gap in a recent blog: “With federal deadlines looming, healthcare organizations need to get moving and there are a lot of job seekers out there ready for the challenge. Are there organizations or companies willing to extend opportunities to these candidates? Is there a training or job-shadowing program that can be used as a best practice for other organizations to implement? Who are the champions already doing this or willing to lead the charge?”

I’d love to hear from any recent healthcare IT graduates who have been hired recently and have an employer willing to help train and mentor them. It takes champions, of course, but every champion needs someone to fight for.

Joe from Healthcare IT today wrote an interesting post highlighting 5 signs why the healthcare IT (which I translate as EMR) job market is heating up. Here’s a summary of his 5 reasons:
-His Healthcare IT friends that were unemployed are starting to find jobs
-The Healthcare IT and EMR job boards are overflowing with good jobs (I’ve seen lots of jobs on these boards myself)
-The number of projects at clients and potential clients has risen dramatically. Meaningful Use and ICD-10 initiatives are finally starting to happen
-Headhunters are starting to call
-Bloggers, columnists and reporters are writing about “the recovery” and how to get ready for it

Not a bad list. I’m seeing a large number of jobs listed on my EMR and HIPAA job board and even more click throughs to those jobs. I think that’s another really good sign. Although, I think we still have a ways to go, the healthcare job market and healthcare IT in particular has got to be one of the best ones out there right now.

It looks like Shahid gets a lot of the same emails I get. He recently posted some suggestions on how to break into the healthcare IT industry. Here’s some of his ideas:

• If you’ve got experience running or working in a medical office or you’re an experienced project manager you can apply for an implementation specialist or assistant at almost any healthcare IT firm like an EMR or EHR vendor, consulting firm, or systems integrator. The thing to keep in mind is that every customer that buys an EMR needs to have it installed and deployed and that’s done by implementation folks. There is a shortage of people that can take complex products like EHRs and EMRs live.
• If you have a little or a lot of general IT experience but no healthcare IT experience you can start by working in a technical support or training capacity. You would get the opportunity to learn new products and use your IT experience to provide customer service, support, and training talent.
• If you’re interested in the software side you can think of being a tester of software; vendors need good quality assurance and configuration management personnel and that’s a great place to begin your healthcare IT career.
• If you’re good at writing, consider joining the documentation team for creating training materials, videos, screencasts, or other related artifacts necessary to teach people how to use healthcare IT.
• If you’re a developer interested in writing software but you’re not experienced in healthcare, join one of the many open source projects that are out there building open source EMRs, EHRs, PHRs, and related tools. Open source is a great way to join a community of people willing to help you if you’re willing to give back to them, too.
• If you’re an integration specialist (you know EAI, EDI, EII, ETL, ESBs, or other integration techniques) start to learn HL7, CCR, and CCD and you can write your own ticket almost anywhere. The majority of healthcare problems in the IT arena are integration and deployment problems so if you know scripting and HL7 you’re good to go.

That’s a pretty good list for people searching for HIT jobs. I also like to point people to this list of EMR, EHR and HIT job websites. I’ve had really good reviews for that resource. I also liked Shahid’s suggestion of working on an open source EMR project in order to gain the experience in the healthcare field.

I came across a really interesting take on the challenge of ensuring that there are enough qualified EMR staff. Here’s a portion of the blog post:

What happens to you when you call asking to buy an EMR, and have it implemented by 2010?

-Will you be told that the vendor doesn’t have the resources, and that you’ll have to wait?
-Or will the vendor sell the EMR, and worry about the implementation later?
-And if the latter is the case, what will that vendor do to get you implemented?

Most vendors know they will have to hire new employees to fill the need for this bolus of implementations that they know is coming–and they also know that these employees will be new, green and inexperienced. Perhaps yours might even be their first implementation. Yes, they may have “supervision” from a more experienced implementer in the organization, but the bottom line is that they will de facto have less experience than they might otherwise.

Not a good thing…but it gets worse.

Now ask yourself where will these new EMR implementation experts come from?

Some will be young staff, perhaps fresh from college looking for their first job. Others may be transitioning from other industries (perhaps even with some implementation experience outside of healthcare). Others might be clinicians looking to transition to IT.

But all of these folks lack the healthcare IT expertise that will be critical to a successful EMR implementation.

It would be ideal if a vendor could hire experienced EMR implementation folks, but where would such individuals be found?

Hospitals, physician groups & practices – why, perhaps even your staff!

You should go and read the rest of the blog post for an interesting discussion of how you can retain your qualified EMR and HIT staff despite the high demand for such qualified people.

If you find this subject interesting, you should also go and check out this take on the regional extension centers timeframes to support EMR implementations and also this really interesting take on the EMR training backlog.