Where The Jobs Are, Some Job Waits For Me*

Posted by:  Peggy Salvatore, www.healthsystemed.com

 *hat tip and a wink to Connie Francis

When your friends are out of work, it is a recession. When you are out of work, it is a depression. When you and your friends work in healthcare or information technology - or both – it’s boom times.

Check the headlines over the past few weeks, and you’ll find that healthcare at 17% of the US economy is still a functioning engine of growth. Yes, national unemployment hovers around 10%, and in some places better or worse (Utah about 4% and Nevada about 15%). But employment isn’t as much about geography as it is about your industry. In automobile manufacturing? Not so much. In nursing? Oh, yeah.

There is a shortage of healthcare workers from physicians down to the guy who switches out the bedpans. And there is a coming shortage in IT workers who are needed to transform healthcare from paper to electronic records.

Believe it or not, in places where people are practically bumming smokes because they are so broke, there are hospitals and employment agencies trying to find workers. Here’s a sample of the kind of issues we face to keep care coming to patients and to keep the system running smoothly as it transitions to electronic records:

• [A] survey by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) found that more than 60% of hospital IT executives believe tech staffing shortages, which some estimate to be a shortfall of 50,000 qualified IT professionals, will definitely or possibly affect their chances to achieve meaningful use. (HITECHWatch, October 29, 2010)

• [T]he unemployment rate for tech professionals (4.3 percent) is far lower than the overall national average (9.6 percent) (CIO Insight, October 28, 2010)
• Atlanta sponsored an all-day Health IT summit on November 9 to “[provide] an opportunity to showcase Georgia's healthcare IT market and career growth in one of the country's fastest growing industries.” http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/georgia-puts-spotlight-health-it-jobs
• Mount Sinai Medical Center in NYC sponsored a hiring event on November 5 to “audition” people for 90 temporary technology training positions internally to help with their IT implementation (Healthcare IT News, October 28, 2010)
• According to statistics from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), by 2020, demand is set to outstrip supply in several specialties, with nonprimary care specialties in general projected to experience a shortage of 62,400 doctors. (Association of American Medical Colleges website, https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/newsreleases/2010/150570/100930.html)

We are all in some way –either personally or people we know - touched by the serious economic downturn in the US. The causes are myriad and the solutions will not be simple or quick – it took a lot of missteps over a long period of time to dig a hole this deep. Recovery will be a long slog from here to economic health. In the meantime, a lot of people – families, businesses – have suffered losses and some may never return to where they were before the meltdown.

However, there are always pockets of growth in any economy and some places where it is good to be during a storm. Not everyone failed in the Great Depression. In fact, some fortunes were made by people with insight and tenacity. That is as true today as it was in the 1930s.

Healthcare and especially transforming the healthcare industry to a fully online and data-driven enterprise is a massive task. It will take an army of a million more workers to transform the army of more than 10 million currently employed in the healthcare sector.  In this field we are in today, there is room for everybody. We need all the talents and resources we can muster to put together a rational system that works.

That means the need is great for systems designers, data and research gurus, dedicated providers, tenacious administrators and creative leaders all along the spectrum to move the entire industry into the future. The jobless rate in the US today is a sad statistic that belies the plight of many individuals; but there are jobs out there looking for workers and healthcare is one of the places to be today during this storm.

This is the first in a series of blogs on the worker shortage in healthcare and health IT. What is the health  job market like in your area? Are you hiring or laying off? Drop us a response; we’d like to hear your thoughts on healthcare employment.

Comments

[Jonena]

Hi Peggy,
How do you explain all the hospitals that have closed their doors these past two years, or all the clinical staff of hospitals that have been let go? While I'm sure your statistics are probably accurate, perhaps I'm just living in a state hit particularly hard - CA.

1. We have the issues of many undocumented workers who use our hospitals without the ability to pay, thus putting an undue financial burden on the emergency departments.
2. CA unemployment is WAY above the national average and when these people get sick, they get care but they are unable to pay the hospitals or providers. They've lost their insurance and have no money.

[Peggy Salvatore]

Hi Jo, You're right about the closures, the reimbursement issues, the rising number of uninsured, and then we have the threat from CMS of the SGR taking about 30% off the Medicare doc's pay - ouch! I thought about addressing the hospital closures and staff cuts we've seen in this blog, and they are real. My sense is that it is market driven, not just geographically but in terms of the structure of the hospital and the population it is intended to serve - so you could have a thriving hospital in a city with a dying hospital. But the bottom line is that there are anticipated provider shortages over the next few years and there are real IT shortages that are going to ratchet up the salaries in certain areas. We could get into a discussion of economics and supply and demand and the impact of reimbursement and pricing on availability of services, but I would be out of my depth. This is a fun intellectual exercise - thanks. But the problem is that there are real patients with real needs that won't get real care because there isn't any money to take care of them. I just spoke with our state medical society people here in PA yesterday about their membership's most pressing needs, and right now all the docs are thinking about is the SGR and taking a pay cut from CMS in a system that already doesn't cover their costs. I don't have answers. I'll share one thing with you and anyone who is reading this thread - yesterday my college-aged daughter told me she is thinking of changing her major from psychology to nursing, and I encouraged her. She knows psych majors who are waitressing for a living, but RNs are in demand. So it is the advice I am giving my kids - go into healthcare. Again, thanks Jo.