Demand for Healthcare IT Consultants, Bust or Boom?

In my previous blog, I stated now is a good time for HIT Integrators to align with one of the open source EMR solutions. I ran across this article from Healthcare IT News “Healthcare IT companies prepare IT consultants for EHR implementations”. Basically they are highlighting the contrasting views on what the future holds for HIT consultants.

COO Rick Jung from Medsphere, a open source provider of OpenVista – an EHR product, is “...seeing a “glut” of interest [from potential business partners that want to get certified on their open source product], which he attributes to the economic recession and the attraction of open source’s value proposition-paying for services and not tools.”

John Hummel, CTO of Perot Systems’ Healthcare Group had a different twist, “The number of people who have completed successful electronic medical record implementations is few and far between….. Perot Systems created its Healthcare Academy a few years ago to train college graduates around the globe. The program has achieve a 100 percent placement rate….”

I’m not sold they have polar opposite opinions, heck I'm not sold they even have different opinions. My read on this article is if you’re a college graduate with a desire to learn about EMRs, there will be opportunities galore for those individuals. However, if you’re an experienced EMR professional and possibly an independent consultant, you may have a difficult time landing a contract because of competition in the marketplace. One exec addressed the employment landscape from a college graduate perspective and the other exec addressed it from an experienced professional point-of-view. They each addressed different segments of the market, not so much that they have different views of what the impact the demand of EHR will have on the marketplace.

Once the government establish the timeline for EHR implementation, the demand for HIT consultants will definitely increase. However, will the marketplace have a gluttony of EMR skills or will it have a shortage, no one knows. However, increase demand does bring about new opportunities.