In Demand: Five of the Most Popular Healthcare IT Roles
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The push for electronic health records integration has led to healthcare IT becoming one of the fastest growing areas in the job market.
While other industries contract, healthcare is still expanding with more and more jobs being created that merge the skills of both healthcare staff and IT workers.
In a new study, CompTIA’s 4th Annual Healthcare IT Insights and Opportunities survey, 375 healthcare providers were asked about the trends behind IT and the health service.
The survey concluded: "A net 89 percent of physicians and other providers now rate IT as important/very important to their practice."
Related: [Video] The Latest with Medical Record Keeping in the Military
In an age where so many people are losing their jobs, here are five roles very much in demand, as initially identified by CIO.com.
1. Clinical Applications Analyst (Average salary: $71,000 a year)
Analysts act the bridge between application functionality and clinical workflow and are heavily involved in the necessary transformation of work processes.
They have to connect the workflows of doctors, clinicians, patients and support services. They also have to have a strong clinical background.
2. Clinical Informatics (Average Salary: $89,000 a year)
Informaticists gather information and turn it into meaningful data, essentially it’s data analytics for the medical world.
This job is essentially where computer science, information science and healthcare meet.
Clinical Informaticistsidentify trends and then apply the data to the real world.
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3. ICD-10 Conversion Project Manager (Average Salary: $94,000 a year)
ICD-10 is the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. Project managers are responsible for the conversion from ICD-9 to ICD-10 and have experienced in both coding and health information management.
ICD is concerned with all the encoding of data from all cases that are treated in a hospital. America is one of the last countries to adopt ICD-10 and the deadline for the nationwide conversion is fast approaching: October 2014.
As hospital and healthcare providers are busily trying to meet the deadline, it goes without saying that conversion project managers are highly sought after.
4. ICD-10 Testing Coordinators/Coders (Average salary: $65,000 a year)
Once ICD-10 is implemented on October 14th there will be about 70,000 codes in existence. Coders responsible for taking all the ICD-9 codes and transferring them over to ICD-10.
Coders will also have to map the new codes to the right location, check for errors and make adjustments.
5. HL7/Interface Analysts and Developers (Average salary: Both $91,000 a year)
The non-profit organization HL7 provides a standard for all healthcare groups to use to ensure that all systems used can actually talk to each other.
Analysts and developers need to be highly technically proficient. The analyst looks at what data is going through HL7 and troubleshoots and identifies trends. Developers are creating the data themselves and building out interface engines that allow for compatibility among different systems. to talk to each other.
This article is based on an original article by Rich Hein for CIO.com, found here
The developing application of IT in the healthcare world will be discussed at IDGA’s DoD/VA Electronic Health Records Integration event in September. For more information, go to www.electronichealthrecordssummit.com
