Healthcare IT Update

HIT Staffing: Do We Need IT Experts or Health Care Experts?

Or do we need both? Training & teamwork strategies that bridge the divide. Refugees from the technology and financial busts are flooding into health care to get their share of stimulus billions, but health care providers won’t get their money’s worth unless they build collaborative teams who really understand what the ‘H’ means in HIT. If you read IT industry news, you come away with the impression that IT professionals with no health care setting experience have all they need to ‘fix’ HIT. A recent ‘Career Tips’ article for IT professionals who want to get into health care is an example. Between 50,000 and 100,000 new HIT jobs will sprout up by 2015, says Information Week, an IT industry trade publication that’s been around for years. “If you’re considering a career path into health IT — but have limited have previous experience working in clinical environments, don’t despair,”…

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Cloud Computing for HIT: Stormy Weather or Silver Lining?

Here are pros and cons to know before you hop on the cloud. More and more IT companies with little to no experience in health care — but plenty of market share on the Internet — are heading into the HIT business, offering providers and other health care professionals off-site server space where they can maintain patient records. This is known as “cloud computing” — in which providers use web-based software provided by the IT company to access that server space, so that their records exist in the so-called “cloud” of the Internet. Cloud computing, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, “is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” AUDIO: Reduce your…

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