The specter of staffing shortages as the nation's hospitals gear up for EMR implementations and "meaningful use" of health IT has shown its face again, this time in the form of a survey of healthcare CIOs.

A bare majority of 51 percent of CIOs responding to a College of Healthcare Information Management Executives survey said that IT staffing shortfalls possibly will hinder their chances of achieving meaningful use and earning Medicare and Medicaid bonus payments in the coming years. Another 10 percent said finding enough qualified workers would "definitely" be a problem as they implement EMRs and other health IT. The issue is most acute in clinical IT, as 71 percent of respondents said they currently did not have enough staff capable of implementing clinical applications.

Still, a majority of the 152 CHIME members that took the survey said that fewer than 5 percent of allocated IT staff positions were open, but 74 percent expressed concern about their ability to retain current IT staff. CIOs reported varying levels of difficulty in filling open positions. Surprisingly, more than 30 percent of hospitals with fewer than 200 beds had no IT jobs available, while major medical centers and multi-hospital systems with at least 400 beds tended to have many openings, CHIME officials said at their annual Fall CIO Forum last week in Chandler, Ariz.

"The survey's results underscore the fact that CIOs expect staffing shortages to affect their ability to implement these important clinical systems and help their organizations qualify to receive stimulus funding," CHIME board member Gary Barnes, CIO at Medical Center Health System in Odessa, Texas, said in a written statement. "Industrywide, providers and vendors alike will be scrambling to identify those who can fill these positions or be quickly trained, so that EHRs can be put into widespread use."

Meanwhile, 28 percent of CIOs said their organizations would achieve meaningful use and thus qualify for federal stimulus dollars in the first half of fiscal year 2011, which began Oct. 1. Another 62 percent expect to qualify later in Stage 1, which runs through Sept. Just one in 10 of those surveyed do not expect to earn bonuses until fiscal years 2013 or 2014, according to CHIME.

For more data:
- view this CHIME press release
- read the full report (.pdf)
- see the Hospitals & Health Networks blog for more CHIME10 news and notes

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