Widespread staffing challenges are a common hurdle for many, especially in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic. Finding talent and keeping job vacancies has always been difficult, but Covid-19 is a catalyst for workforce volatility that has invaded nearly every industry imaginable. Then came the big resignations, which brought staffing shortages across the organization to record heights.
The medical industry has not been spared either. In the past, the shortage of health workforce was mainly due to the limited availability of nurses and clinicians in the job market, but a new wave of staff turnover has also been rapidly brought into the information technology (IT) department of the health organization, creating a severe talent gap and greatly reducing the technical capacity across the board. . Competitive salaries and a sharp rise in job offers further complicate matters.
A booming job market and rising inflation continue to cripple healthcare IT teams and place enormous pressure on organizations. Policymakers must do more with fewer people, and while upskilling may be a potential solution, it is also a significant time and revenue investment.
How can traditional healthcare IT leaders overcome the enormous pressures of digital transformation, infrastructure modernization, mergers, acquisitions, cybersecurity threats, and more with reduced employee capabilities? How do digital health and healthcare tech companies compete with Google, Amazon, or the thousands of other tech companies in the healthcare industry?
Solution: Increasingly, health systems rely on the resources of strategic interoperability partners to reduce these burdens and modernize their business models. Interoperability has always been a high-demand skillset, which has grown exponentially since the start of the pandemic, especially in relation to Acceleration and Professional Services Agreements to reduce employee turnover gaps and minimize upskilling cost.
Accelerate your migration to the cloud
Before the pandemic, the healthcare industry’s focus on cloud was just getting started. Fast forward to today, and this is a high-level priority. Data security has become a key issue for an industry that has previously been very slow to adopt. Leaking sensitive data carries heavy penalties and risks.
Modernizing with cloud solutions has lasting benefits. It limits infrastructure overhead and helps support potential gaps left by IT staff attrition, enabling healthcare organizations to focus less on data entry and more on the patient experience and the organization’s strategic goals and plans. Cloud solutions can manage large amounts of data, ensure security and help ensure business continuity through more seamless scalability, high availability and disaster recovery — all of which are necessary for the industry to grow.
The difficulty here is finding and retaining in-house talent with cloud capabilities and experience. A software engineer who can write code and hold the AWS Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect qualifications is a valuable asset and therefore a very coveted and hot commodity for any talent acquisition team. Internal recruiting not only entails paying well for these competencies, but it also opens the door for other entities to poach valuable talent.
Instead, an expertly integrated migration to the cloud can be better achieved by leveraging external technical expertise to support IT needs—many organizations are now looking to fully managed cloud services.
Professional services engagement on the rise
Many IT leaders understand that their employees are specialized and not necessarily able to fill additional roles. It can be difficult to leverage existing talent to meet all IT needs, especially when technology changes and evolves so quickly. By leveraging professional services engagement, organizations can alleviate the dilemma of a limited IT workforce through integration projects, system upgrades and migrations, staff augmentation, training, and more.
Outsourcing allows health IT departments to deploy expertise on problems they struggle to solve in-house. It is for this reason that staffing requests have increased fivefold, with agreements ranging from a few months to a year. More and more health IT leaders recognize the flexibility and optimization opportunities that professional managed service providers offer their organizations.
The right interoperability partner has the expertise and experience to step in immediately across a variety of legacy technology environments—even if they don’t build workflows and specific interfaces. It can be a seamless experience with the potential to resolve projects in a timely manner (without extra hassle).
Participating in such strategic partnerships allows health IT leaders to focus on internal needs, whether it’s cybersecurity, enhancing products or technologies, or trying to meet new or changing compliance regulations. Outsourcing IT with a consistent interoperability partner is an easy way to reduce the compliance, governance and security burdens of often small and limited in-house IT teams.
How to Identify the Right Interoperability Partner
Leveraging a reliable outsourced branch office to implement cloud technology and deploy additional specialized technical services can benefit healthcare IT departments in many ways. The key is finding the right partner to ensure long-term success.
When outsourcing, there are six things that Vendor Interoperability Partners need to be aware of:
- The ability to do the job correctly: Get a clear understanding of their capabilities and investments. Are they able to scale for your organization? To answer this question, it is important to start with the main goals and objectives of the system, internal KPIs, and overall expected results.
- Safety Professional: Ask about network security measures. How do they keep track of the different regulations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? Do they have external governance and credentials? You need to know that your suppliers (and even your suppliers’ suppliers) adhere to the strictest security requirements.
- Response level: The interoperability partner, and more specifically your designated account management team, should be responsive. Did the solution architect deliver on the promise? Have you set a realistic timeline to meet your organization’s needs? Many of these questions can be answered at the RFP stage or during the client onboarding process.
- Industry knowledge: Do they have in-depth knowledge and experience with the involvement your health system requires? Do they understand the specific needs of the healthcare space, especially those related to compliance and privacy?
- Experience and Skills: Does the vendor have the breadth, depth and history of the type of engagement you need? Which clients have they served? What workflows do they support? What systems are they connected to?
- Continuous Learning Mindset: Are they taking care of their employees and investing in ongoing training around new technologies? Is there a strong learning culture and team dynamics? Are they committed to the entire skillset lifecycle of team members?
Address your IT workforce gap with modernization and external support
Healthcare IT decision makers have incredible responsibilities and organizational goals to meet, and the recent workforce gap has created even more challenges for them. However, there is a way out of this predicament and into a more successful future – and that is to choose and rely on strategic interoperability partners for cloud services, IT support and other professional managed services needs.
Photo: ipopba, Getty Images
