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.