Most healthcare organizations, including virtually every hospital and health system, are juggling one or more technology projects at any given time. These could include the implementation and/or support of a CRM, an EHR, or an ERP platform, along with cloud infrastructure, informatics, and security projects. Looking through a broader lens, these projects combine to form an organization’s digital transformation.
Digital transformation isn’t just a buzzword in healthcare, but rather a way of doing business. Because of increasing competition, measurable benefits of different technologies, pressure from leadership to optimize technologies, and most importantly, the potential for improved care management, innovation is necessary. Today’s healthcare organization’s have no choice but to innovate or be left behind.
Innovation is difficult, particularly from a budget and resources perspective. Healthcare leadership must adhere to strict annual budgets and project budgets, while advancing technologies and showing measurable results—how did this innovation translate to better patient analytics, enhanced clinician-to-clinician communication, cost savings, time savings, or even improved patient outcomes?
Here are the biggest healthcare IT staffing challenges tied to any organization’s digital transformation efforts, both per project and on an annual basis:
- Determining the implementation and support staff needed
- Accurately budgeting for staff
- Finding the right experience and skills in a tight labor market
- Onboarding and integrating new staff quickly
- Striking the right balance between permanent and temporary staff
- Being able to quickly scale up and down based on demand across an organization
One example we’ve seen frequently, which tends to highlight all of these challenges, is when organizations have invested significant resources into a major implementation project, and been forced to cut or redirect staff dedicated to secondary or tertiary projects. With aforementioned budget limitations and pressures to innovate, these examples are inevitable to some degree, but they can be alleviated with smart, strategic staffing.
More specifically, EHR projects, including Epic implementations and optimization projects, have been the priority at many organizations. In fact, per a recent Medix and QuestionPro survey (and webinar, which you can watch on-demand), 56% of America’s healthcare IT leaders plan to invest in their EHR over the next two years. We’ve seen cases where organizations essentially de-emphasize other, concurrent projects during EHR implementations, leaving them with a successful go-live, but also with a compromised level of support elsewhere—perhaps with their clinical informatics initiatives, ERP optimization projects, or security measures.
These transition periods, where resources are thin and project demands are high, magnify every staffing challenge. Time and again, money and staff are stretched thin, and healthcare IT leaders are left to stress over meeting budgets and preventing employee burnout.
The good news is, there is a proven solution—a solution to save money, and ensure you have the right staff in place for every technology project, organization wide:
Partnering with a specialty staffing agency, like Medix Technology.
Here at Medix Technology, we have over two decades of experience supporting healthcare organizations just like yours. By partnering with us, you can hire technology talent quickly, decrease your recruiting and hiring costs significantly, rely less on costly consulting agencies, and successfully navigate your entire digital transformation roadmap.
Whether you need temporary implementation talent or permanent support talent, we can find it in our deep candidate pool. We’re experts in staffing for application development, cloud and infrastructure services, cybersecurity, data science and modeling, business intelligence, and more.
We can also help you build a technology staff with a new level of flexibility. While we offer qualified full-time talent, we also offer contract talent for short-term project needs, enabling you to control labor costs to a higher degree. As a bonus, after a contractor’s assignment ends, they can offboard, or, you can make a full-time offer to them, retaining their expertise and knowledge.
With so much emphasis on budgeting and innovation, now is the time to build your most agile and cost-effective healthcare technology team. Contact us today to get started.
