HIT shortage can only get worse

IT is a complex profession in and of itself, and health IT management even more so. While I'm not an IT recruiter, I'd wager that you wouldn't want anyone with less than a decade of hard-core experience under their belt to take a top position in your organization (with most, if not all, directly in health organization). The problem is, there's just not enough of such people to fuel the great health IT revolution we're seeing today.

As the study outlined in today's issue suggests, we'll need more than the 40,000 professionals we've got on duty within a short stretch--say, three to five years max--or the whole EMR adoption movement will stumble badly.

Sure, some folks in Congress have begun to notice the big professional shortage their pro-EMR policies will create. For example, Rep. David Wu (D-OR) is backing the "10,000 trained by 2010 Act," which helps fund health IT education. While that falls far short of the 40,000 or so HIT staffers we'll need, it's at least a start. However, those 10,000 will include at least some very green folks, which doesn't quite fit the bill.

What's even scarier about this is that not only are we going to need HIT pros to keep the EMR ship on course, we'll need more such pros with deep clinical skills. If it's hard to recruit a seasoned health IT expert, recruiting physician or nurse IT specialists will be even more costly and difficult. My guess is that there will be an even more painful shortage in this job category. Unfortunately, healthcare just isn't an industry that can easily hand off high-profile jobs to junior people in the 20s. Sure, they'll do some of the work, as they do in every IT organization. But given the depth of skills and experience HIT leadership requires--even for middle management, much less C-level jobs--it's pretty risky to promote talented young folks too quickly.

I wish I could tell you I had suggestions for solving problem, but I don't--other than, perhaps aggressively retraining top pros from other industries. I do know that if providers don't want their plans to grind to a halt for lack of support, they're going to have to get creative, and fast. Maybe your health system isn't rolling out an EMR today, but if you don't do anything to address the HIT talent shortage, good luck getting it implemented in 2010.- Anne