In our current economic client, it’s been quite interesting for me to keep an eye on the EMR, EHR and Health IT job market. While many in the country are out of work, those with healthcare and IT experience are usually in very high demand across the country.
I recently heard this quote from Michael Dell (founder of Dell):
“If we set up a new site to hire 100 software or storage or networking engineers, we have to go find them one at a time and seek them out and convince them and cajole them to come work for us. If we set up a warehouse or distribution center and we have 100 jobs there, we will have a line of 10,000 people waiting outside to try to get those jobs.”
I think we’re seeing something similar in healthcare IT. As long time readers will probably know, we have our own EMR, EHR and Health IT job board. Here are two of the jobs that were recently posted on the job board:
Senior Healthcare IT Project Manager
Senior IT Systems Analyst
Watching that job board and also seeing the jobs that are submitted on the Healthcare Scene LinkedIn group is interesting. You definitely see the trend that Michael Dell mentions. There are a lot of skilled jobs available, and not enough skilled people to fill those jobs.
I’ll be interested to see how this evolves in a post-HITECH era. Right now if you have EHR experience and expertise, there are a wide variety of jobs available to you. I’m sure there are pockets and communities where this isn’t the case, but across the country there are people looking for people who know and understand EHR. Many of the top EHR consulting firms can’t get enough people on board to support their projects. Plus, we’re only at about 50% adoption (depending on whose numbers you prefer).
I expect the above trend to continue at least through the end of meaningful use and likely well beyond that. As I often tell people, healthcare is going to be around forever and using technology to improve healthcare isn’t going anywhere either.