Guest author: Karen Burton
A recent survey from HIMSS Analytics shows that the job market for healthcare IT remains hot. More than 85% of the survey’s respondents—which included 224 executives working for hospital/healthcare system IT departments as well as vendor organizations—said they had hired at least one new employee in 2012. Only 13% said they had implemented layoffs in 2012.
Outsourcing was popular among the survey respondents, with 76% saying they had outsourced at least one IT function instead of hiring new staff, and 93% saying they plan to outsource at some point in 2013. The most popular roles to outsource were project management, clinical application development and system design and implementation.
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Interestingly, 31% said they had put an IT project on hold because of staff shortages, and executives at both healthcare systems and vendors said they were struggling to find qualified candidates. This could be caused by lower salaries in healthcare IT compared to other IT roles; InformationWeek‘s 2013 U.S. IT Salary Survey found that the median annual pay in healthcare IT was $4,000 lower than in IT overall.
Do you think hiring in Healthcare IT is ripe, and will remain hot? Or this this trend just hype, and likely to drop off soon?
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