According to the most recent report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare sector added some 33,000 jobs in May, with most of those in ambulatory healthcare services. Hospital IT executives, including CIOs, CMIOs and related positions, were not exempt from this trend, according to Rachel Polhemus, a senior partner with executive search firm Witt/Kieffer.
"Given the initiatives out there to be met — ICD-10, meaningful use — we're seeing an uptick in employment," she says. CMIOs and CNIOs are in particularly high demand, she says, as hospitals and health systems need an executive who understands clinicians' needs and is able to be a liaison between IT and the medical staff. "They need that facilitator to support the needs of the clinicians and articulate their hopes and dreams to the technology team," says Ms. Polhemus. System consolidation, the formation of joint ventures and the expansion of physician enterprises further necessitate the need for a medical informatics executive. "You need someone to support the technology of the physician enterprise that has the skill mix to execute this on the ambulatory side," she says.
Consolidation and the growing importance of technology within healthcare organizations is making all IT executive jobs more complex and requiring leaders with a specific set of qualifications. "With consolidation, the scale becomes so big you need someone with the breadth and depth of knowledge to handle the hospital side, the ambulatory side and sometimes the post-acute care side," says Ms. Polhemus. "They also need the strategic skills to be able to see where the organization is going… they need to have an understanding of the organization's business needs and how technology can support them."
However, executives who meet all these requirements are hard to come by. To find a suitable leader, some of Witt/Kieffer's clients are looking outside of healthcare. This can work, says Ms. Polhemus, if the IT department has a strong, well-supported team in place and the new executive can be more strategically focused. "But, the risk there is them not understanding and appreciating the clinical side and not understanding that [supporting a hospital's IT system] is different than supporting a place that's only open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.," she says.
To find talent, Ms. Polhemus says some organizations have found success considering nontraditional candidates from within the technology department. Because IT staffers may have entered the workforce without a college degree, they are often overlooked. But talented employees who have risen through the ranks could be good candidates for executive positions; it simply depends on how comfortable the organization is having an executive without a bachelor's degree, she says.
Many organizations have also looked to clinicians who have taken an interest in IT. However, moving from practicing physician to CMIO, for example, requires IT abilities in which the candidate often has had no formal training. Just a small number of (now very valuable) physicians have actively pursued technology or informatics education, she says.
The scarcity of qualified leaders is why hospitals and health systems should be prepared to pay a higher compensation for a candidate with the desired background. "They're really hard to come by," says Ms. Polhemus, "and they often demand their own price."
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