health organization

HIT shortage can only get worse

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:59:59 -0400

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

SPOTLIGHT: Henry Ford saves with eROI

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:01:32 -0400

Managing releases of medical information (ROI) can be a major drain on a health organization. Nowhere is that more true than at Henry Ford Hospital and Health Network, which gets more than 42,000 ROI requests every year. To tame this problem, Henry Ford has re-engineered its entire process, using a new work flow management tool which controls access to both paper and electronic medical records. The new, affordable system has generated some remarkable benefits, including a 50 to 60 percent reduction in phone calls and a substantial savings on copy services. Article

VA suffers major data loss, again

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:01:37 -0500

While it's tempting to just say that security breaches happen, we at FierceHealthIT are beginning to be a bit knocked back by the volume of major health organization data losses taking place over the past six months. The latest came early last week, when the VA said that it had lost track of data on 1.8 million veterans and doctors. That includes billing information on about 1.3 million doctors nationwide, and Social Security numbers on about 535,000 individuals. The data, which was missing from an Alabama hospital for about three weeks, was located on an external hard drive used to back up an employee's desktop machine.

This isn't the first time the VA has been caught red-faced after a data loss was reported relatively late. Last year, a VA executive and data analyst ended up out of their jobs after it was discovered that they'd failed to reveal the theft of data on 26.5 million vets quickly.

To learn more about the incident:
- read this piece in The Tennessean

Related Articles:
Johns Hopkins loses patient, employee data. Report
Massive data loss at HCA. Report
Allina suffers patient data theft. Report
VA pledges better data security. Report

Health IT plans affect financial ratings

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:01:34 -0500

If you're a health IT leader, you already know that your work has a critical impact on how your organization operates. But did you know that the design of your health IT program can also have an impact on how the financial industry sees your institution? According to one expert, a director of Healthcare Ratings at Standard & Poor's in New York, credit rating agencies, banks, bond insurers and other financial institutions take a look at the soundness of a healthcare organization's IT plans at many points in their analytical process. This includes when they consider investing, underwriting bond issues or rating the soundness of these bonds. The hospital and health system debt rating process, for example, relies in part on evaluation of IT use, because raters see IT plans as a partial measure of the strength of management, ability to relate to physicians and ability to make smart capital investments. Questions these groups ponder include:

What kind of systems (such as EMRs, CPOE, financial systems, BI or more) are the health organization's priority?
What does the healthcare organization hope to accomplish by making a given IT investment?
What percentage does IT represent of the health organization's overall capital budget for the next five years?
What obstacles does the IT plan face, and how is the organization addressing those potential hurdles?

Of course, process changes that support higher-quality medicine are always going to be a health organization's top priority, notes S&P's Liz Sweeney. But good IT planning can do a lot to serve a healthcare organization's mission, which definitely has an effect on the way it will be seen in the financial community.

Get more background on the health IT and credit rating issue:
- read this piece from HHN Most Wired