The DoD EHR Contract Will Open Up EHR Jobs for Most Vendors

In case you missed the news, Cerner won the massive DoD EHR contract over Epic and Allscripts. No doubt it is a big win for Cerner. $4.3 Billion to start is going to mean employment for a lot of people who do Cerner EHR consulting. I’m sure that Leidos and their massive network of partners are already working on recruiting the best Cerner talent.

While it’s true that there are going to be a lot Cerner jobs and demand for Cerner experience is going to be at an all time high, I believe that this contract is also going to mean that a lot of other EHR vendors have a surge as well. A rising tide lifts all boats as they say.

For example, you might read my post about how Epic will benefit from not winning the DoD EHR contract. In case you don’t want to click that link, essentially Epic could very well win a bunch more EHR contracts that they wouldn’t have won otherwise since many will wonder if they want to go with an EHR vendor that is going to be busy dealing with a $4.3 billion contract. I expect that will lead to a number of Epic sales and will mean an increase in demand for Epic experience. The same could be true for other EHR vendors that are competing with Cerner.

With that in mind, watch our healthcare IT job board over the next few months and some of these popular EHR job searches:

As always, you can also search our health IT job board for other jobs at any time. Plus, if you’re a health IT job seeker, it’s free to register, upload your resume, and apply for jobs. Employers can also register and post jobs to Healthcare IT Central and get access to our nearly 25,000 health IT professionals.

What impact do you think the DoD EHR contract will have on the EHR industry? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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.

5 Comments

  • Hello Mr. Lynn,

    I have over 6 years in hospital information technology service. My duties mainly fall in the workstation/computer network area. I hold a meaningful use HIT technical support certificate.

    In the past 3 years, I have worked in clinical data analysis on a basic level. In all this time I have tried to obtain Cerner, Epic, etc. training with no opportunity to be trained in any of these EHR systems. There is a tremendous call in the EHR industry to train health information technology professionals on the main and latest EHR systems. But professionals like me repeatedly run into roadblocks with EHR training — Why !! Now with the DoD EHR contracts will this short-sighted policy of not providing training opportunities to professionals like me change?

    Incidentally, I am unemployed and I see tons of employment opportunities for candidates with Cerner, Epic, etc. training and experience. But I cannot obtain employment because I lack the training in these systems.

    I call on someone that might have constructive information for professionals in my predicament to provide meaningful training information as to how we can be trained in these EHR systems especially when there is a shortage of staff trained in the main EHR systems and looking at the DoD EHR contract the lack of trained professionals in these systems will be acutely felt.

    Regards,
    NE

  • My question is – how are all these people going to get security clearance to work on DoD software when the data base used to do the extensive highly detailed sensitve personal confidential information was just hacked and all that info was stolen?

  • RH,
    It’s a fine question. I imagine many people will have to be cleared. Also, Leidos has done government work for a long time, so they have some expertise dealing with this already. However, many of the jobs have no need for clearance since they’re not actually seeing any data. For example, if you’re training people on the EHR, they don’t necessarily have to have any access to any real data. They can use a test system and train them on it.

  • My question is — How do IT professionals with 7 or more years working in Information Technology departments in a clinical/hospital environment obtain Cerner certification or Epic certification etc.

    I have been asking this question for some time now and no one responds. Can anyone answer this question? How difficult can this question be?

  • MME,
    The question is only difficult because the only way to get that certification is through a customer. If you work for an Epic or Cerner customer, then they know the path to get it. If you don’t, then you’re really up a creek without a paddle. Sad, but is so far true. I’d love for them to change this policy since there all plenty of quality people that could become certified that can’t get it.

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