It may not be long before Explorys outgrows the loft space at its Cleveland offices. The health-care big data firm has doubled its staff to 100 in the last year.
“We’ve done very well at attracting great talent,” said Steve McHale, co-founder and CEO of Explorys.
McHale is thinking about starting a second office, as Explorys’ client list has grown more than two-fold to 200 hospitals and more than a dozen health systems. He’s not worried about finding talent.
“Frankly, it’s not been a big path of resistance for us,” he admitted. But Explorys may be an anomaly.
The competition for workers with high-tech analytics skills has been explosive over the last five years. It has accelerated partly because of new digital billing and patient-monitoring requirements for hospitals, doctors and physician groups under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
New research from Burning Glass found that while total online job postings have grown a tepid 6 percent since 2007, and overall health care sector posting growth has actually slowed to just 5 percent, health-care informatics job listings have surged more than 50 percent. Among the job descriptions seeing the biggest surge in demand are jobs for clinical application developer, which are up 232 percent in the last five years, and coding compliance and review officers, which have nearly doubled.
At the same time, consultants from PwC found two-thirds of health-care executives they surveyed said they’re experiencing IT staff shortages, as they roll out new technology in their organizations.
“Fifty to sixty percent of those CEOs are saying they’re concerned that they don’t have the skills required to execute the strategy that they just created,” said Daniel Garrett, PwC Healthcare IT Practice Leader. “That’s, to me, a signal that there’s a real issue here.”
Date: May 23, 2013