This week I’ve been at the CHIME Fall Forum conference in San Antonio. For those not familiar with CHIME, it’s the leading association of healthcare CIOs and brings together CIOs from around the country and world. It’s an impressive group of healthcare IT leaders.
During the event, I’ve had the chance to talk with a wide variety of CIOs from organizations of all sizes. One universal truth they’ve all expressed is how hard it is to attract and retain talented healthcare IT professionals in their organization. The competition for this talent is extreme and many are suffering from the turnover of their IT staff or the challenge of getting qualified professionals into their organization in the first place.
After talking with them, they have a challenge with most of their health IT positions, but their most challenging positions seem to be in healthcare cybersecurity professionals and in analytics. No doubt many of these organizations are competing as much with other industries as they are with other healthcare organizations for these professionals. That’s particularly true with cybersecurity professionals which are in high demand in every industry.
There’s no easy solution to this problem. The supply of qualified professionals is low and the demand for them is high. Simple economics at work. This is why it’s so important that healthcare CIOs don’t take their efforts in retaining their staff lightly. I, unfortunately, see many organizations making short-term decisions which damage them long term in a very big way. In fact, many of them get stuck with open positions for long periods of time after losing a qualified staff member.
Are you seeing this in your organization? What are you doing to combat this challenge in your organization? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
