| The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), enacted under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has been considered as a bane or a boon depending on an individual's perspective. One of the provisions of law calls for implementation of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems to reach meaningful use. This led to the silicon rush of 2009. In this report, we analyze data from the Dorenfest Institute for H.I.T. Research and Education (HIMSS Foundation) to identify changes in the staffing requirements since the law was passed. We analyze the sectors of Information Technology (IT) where staffing has increased as we progress to reach meaningful use. We notice that the majority of the hospitals have been hiring IT project managers, management staff and EMR support staff. We study the co-relation of the hospital size to the IT hiring frenzy, to identify if the boom in healthcare IT job market was confined to only certain hospitals or if it was a universal phenomenon all across the board. We observed that the increase in IT staffing has occurred mostly in small size hospitals (hospitals with 100 beds or less). The self-reported data shows that on average for 2008-2010, the small size hospitals were spending nearly 6 times more per bed on their IT budget than large hospitals. The purpose of this paper is to raise flags about the staffing trends we observe in actual practice and to understand the organizational effect of technology in the healthcare industry. |
Updated 03/19/2014