Difficult to Fill HIE Jobs

AHIMA and HIMSS recently joined forces to do an HIE staffing survey. The survey found that Connectivity, Data Integrity and Data Integration positions were really difficult to fill. The survey also found that HIE’s were paying more for these positions. While this might sound like simple supply and demand, it’s more complex than that considering many HIE organizations have issues around how they’re going to fund their HIE.

It’s good news that these HIE organizations are able to pay these qualified health IT and health information management professionals a better wage than previous surveys have predicted. No doubt, demand for professionals with this type of experience is only going to increase. I think this is especially true as many healthcare organizations spin up their own private HIEs.

I do wonder if some of the survey data is skewed by the insurance companies who participated. They’ve been doing some similar work for a long time and they have more money to spend on the problem. I’d like to see a breakout of the data by Insurance Company, Health System, and HIE. I think we’d likely see a big difference between each type of HIE organization.

I did a quick search on Healthcare IT Central for HIE jobs and only 2 showed up in the results. However, I did a search on Health Information Management jobs and found page after page of jobs. That might be one of the challenges for healthcare professionals with HIE experience. Everyone calls the position something a little bit different. I think as more and more organizations implement and participate in HIEs, we’ll see a clearer job title come to fruition.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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