Hottest Job Skills For Health IT Pros This Year

Here’s a nice little take on how the health IT recruiting market is shaping up for this year.

According to recruiter Guillermo Moreno, vice president of recruiting firm Experis Healthcare, not only will IT leaders be fighting for team members with EMR/EHR skills, there’s also five other health IT skillsets that will be in high demand:

* ICD-10/5010 expertise:   With companies migrating to ICD-10, demand for informed pros will be  at an “all time high” in 2012, Moreno notes. (Editor’s note: If you haven’t hired them already, or at least begun reaching out, you’re really, really late to the game. Surely you’re better prepared, readers?)

* Applications insights:  Moreno notes that healthcare organizations need strong developers to create apps focused on measuring quality and meeting standards. Hard to argue that.

* Security and compliance chops:  This year, providers are moving from focusing largely on internal security to making sure information moves safely from one location to another, Moreno says. So pros with a strong grasp of information security management will be hotly pursued this year.

*  Data management abilities:  As Moreno sees it, there’s still some data management and data security skillsets that aren’t too common in healthcare.  In the near future, he says, such experts will be badly needed, in part to make sure organizations have plans in place to prepare for possible losses of protected information.

* BI/analytics experience:  If providers hope to aggregate data in a sophisticated way — something that will be more needed each year as quality measurement standards spike — they’ll need to recruit more pros with business intelligence and analytics skills.  That’s particularly the case now, given that current packaged healthcare analytics tools aren’t that mature, Moreno argues.

I find it hard to argue that these are all hot areas for health IT recruiting. There’s a couple others I think should be hot recruiting items too:

* CMIO/CNIO etc.:  If hospitals are smart, they’ll do more to recruit crossover medical/IT pros who can speak to both sides and make clinicians comfortable with new tech. Putting volunteer “champions” in place can’t do much if the technology wasn’t a good clinical fit in the first place.

* Health IT project managers:   With health IT departments swamped with  big picture demands, simply getting the day to day project work done is no joke. Sure, hospitals may have big-ticket consulting firms in place to handle the checkbox work right now, but when those folks pack up, will your IT organization have enough smart project  managers in place be able to keep the trains running on time?

I’d argue that there’s also room to create as-yet unknown jobs which are more or less pure EMR cheerleader, user experience researchers and vendor harassment liasons. (OK, the last one is a bit over the top…but I stand by the other two. And while we’re at it, is there anyone whose day-to-day job it is to hold vendors’ feet the fire?)

 

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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