Addressing the Healthcare Workforce Shortage

Our guest writer contemplates the evolving needs of the healthcare workforce from educational competencies to health equity, and how we can identify opportunities for changing the industry and its workforce.

The goal of assuring a healthcare workforce able to support optimal adoption, use and advancement of health information and technology is complex. The range of competencies needed reflects the spectrum from healthcare delivery to pure IT, from data infrastructure to its collection and use, and from support of IT functions within healthcare delivery institutions to technology use by consumers.

The rapid change and advancement of IT broadly and specific to health IT itself, as well as rapid advances in both content and delivery approach of healthcare itself adds to the complexity. The impact of change on this complexity increases exponentially when we consider how advances in the two realms iterate and fuel each other. A final dimension of dynamic complexity comes from the social, economic and political environment in which we all operate.