Current State of Healthcare IT Staffing: Navigating Persistent Challenges

Attrition in healthcare is an ongoing concern, with the national healthcare turnover rate currently standing at 20.7% — according to a recent study. In navigating today’s IT workforce, IT departments may struggle to attract and retain qualified talent due to limited local talent pools or increased competition between health organizations and new market entrants. Additionally, hospitals and health clinics often face challenges meeting growing staff expectations — requiring more competitive salaries, greater work life balance, enhanced career development, or remote work options to boost retention.

Amid these staffing difficulties, healthcare organizations depend on IT experts for critical projects, including: (a) building, managing and maintaining a highly secure perimeter around frequently targeted infrastructure and endpoints; (b) supporting provider staff in their consumption and knowledge of caregiving technology; and (c) ensuring that ongoing system-wide training and device management aligns with institution compliance and local/national regulations.

When long-term support gaps occur in these areas, health organizations are left vulnerable to quality degradation, provider dissatisfaction, and security risks year after year. Yet, many health organizations continue to rely on the high, unpredictable costs of recruiting, hiring, training and retaining staff, only to combat a 20% attrition rate on the other side.

Nevertheless, there are staffing strategy alternatives! Organizations like Med Tech Solutions (MTS) deliver a near-constant state of IT experts, who are recruited and trained to proactively support all IT-related functions in our client environments. MTS takes the attrition risk out of the equation for healthcare organizations. Having served the healthcare industry for over 20 years, MTS attracts and retains top IT talent — achieving SLAs for client services that can only come with seasoned experts. Beyond this value, MTS invests heavily and frequently in the latest tools to continually advise and inform our clients of industry best practices.

For many organizations, the first-year cost of internally recruiting, hiring and training one new healthcare IT specialist will range between $20,000 and $90,000, with no guarantee of long-term retention. Instead, consider cost-effectively combating turnover by utilizing a variety of staffing approaches — like partial IT outsourcing with MTS — and better ease operational and financial burdens.

To learn more about securing health IT talent through MTS Managed Services, click here.