According to the consulting firm Aon Hewitt, you may not be getting a raise this year. Its survey found that businesses plan to keep their raise budgets fairly flat next year while shifting increased amounts of it toward performance-based pay — meaning only top performers would see significantly bigger paychecks. Companies plan to allot an average 12.5% of payroll toward incentive and bonus pay in 2018, but employees will need to work even harder if they want a piece of the pie: 15% of those firms that plan to change their pay structure said they will set more competitive targets. Companies are focused on retaining top workers, as low unemployment rates increase competition for talent.
We see this happening in a lot of areas of healthcare IT. No doubt it’s happening in the EHR world where many organizations are finding it a real challenge to find professionals with Epic EHR and Cerner EHR experience. Not to mention Epic certified professionals since Epic has chosen to be so restrictive in who they allow to get Epic certified.
Beyond EHR, the competition for talent is even more of a challenge in the worlds of healthcare security and data analytics. I’ve found most organizations are finding it really hard to fill any security positions because demand for that talent within and outside of healthcare is so strong. Every organization wants these talented security professionals and there are just not enough of them to go around.
When it comes to analytics, finding high quality data scientists is a challenge. This challenge is amplified when an organization wants the data scientist to have healthcare knowledge and experience. Many are resorting to training in house resources who understand healthcare to be data scientists.
Given all of these dynamics, you can see why organizations are switching to more “value based pay” options in order to retain the highest performing staff. However, as we’ve been watching healthcare switching to value based reimbursement, it can often be a challenge to truly evaluate how well someone is performing. Plus, the wrong value based program can incentivize the wrong actions.
It seems like everywhere we look there’s a switch to value based payments. Are you seeing this happen in your organization? Is this a good shift or a bad shift for healthcare workers?
