By Jessica Thomas, Associate Vice President Staffing Services, CereCore
Twitter: @CereCore
And how Healthcare IT Staffing provides a valuable answer.
After 20+ years of experience providing staff to hospitals and operators, I know firsthand that finding the right technical talent is more critical than ever. Hospital and healthcare providers face tremendous change from a variety of factors: consolidation and divestiture, regulation, and the availability of new technologies that improve patient care. This drives EHR implementations, optimization, integration, and a growing need for technical leadership. The priorities impacting the workforce for these organizations are further evidenced by the HIMSS 2019 Workforce Survey. Here, we discuss some of the main health information and technology priorities and the impact on staffing your organization.
1: Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Security is a top priority across all healthcare provider groups
Survey respondents, especially Hospital respondents, prioritized security and privacy with “surprising intensity” in the HIMSS survey. This suggests a growing number of provider organizations realize the need to protect existing business practices before aggressively pursuing other information and technology issues. If true, then the downstream implication is that other information and technology objectives may not be addressed until down the road.
2: Almost half of non-acute provider organizations lack IT leadership
According to the survey, roughly 90 percent of hospital respondents indicated their organization employed at least one IT executive, while over half (53 percent) of non-acute respondents reported their organization did not have an IT executive. While acute and non-acute organizations appear to have different approaches to technology, these findings indicate that non-acute provider organizations could struggle to advance their information and technology capabilities in 2019 without the technical talent and leadership necessary to lead these efforts. The good news is that technical leadership can be provided via an outsourced CIO or IT Advisory services, depending on the situation.
3: The majority of Vendors (81%) and Providers (59%) expect there to be increased demands for information and technology resources the coming year
The bottom line is that hospitals and provider organizations require a robust and skilled IT workforce, and this isn’t expected to change moving forward. What is changing is the type of roles needed: for CIOs, Senior Clinical IT Executives, and Information Security leaders in the hospital setting.
How does healthcare IT staffing provide a solution for some of these priorities? A staffing provider with expertise in the healthcare provider industry, an excellent track record, and well-established recruiting technologies and processes are able to deliver value to provider organizations:
- Scale – A staffing provider that is placing new contractors at scale is able to source from the networks of their many recruiters. This plays into the quality, cost, and efficiency for providing hard-to-find skills such as QA testers, project managers, engineers, architects, and IT leadership.
- Cost – Staffing providers who are well-established often have lower overhead costs and can pass on savings to your organization.
- Lower Risk – A staffing provider with a high customer satisfaction rate demonstrates quality in matching skills to organizations, which ultimately lowers your risk.
While healthcare providers will engage in EHR advisory, implementation, and optimization projects, providers also require internal expertise and leadership to connect and guide technical strategy and execution. And that means that Healthcare IT staffing will always play a key role in answering the needs of our evolving healthcare provider industry.
This article was originally published on CereCore and is republished here with permission.