In September, the 56-year-old information-technology worker took a job troubleshooting issues doctors, nurses and other users are having with a new government-funded electronic-records system at a Raleigh, North Carolina, health-care company.
“Normally I wouldn’t have taken this, because I have done things at a higher level,” Tricas said of the recruiting call for the position. “But I said, ’I’ll take it’ because that gets my foot in the door.”
With President Barack Obama’s re-election ensuring that his 2010 law will be implemented, companies are scouting for workers like Tricas to fill hundreds of thousands of jobs in everything from running records systems to creating and servicing new insurance exchanges and entering thousands of additional codes for health-care treatments.
The federal government projects that under the law, 30 million more Americans will start getting coverage in 2014 through expanded state Medicaid programs or private insurers, or pay a penalty. A study published this month in the Annals of Family Medicine found that the newly insured will contribute to rising demand for medical services, requiring an estimated 8,000 more doctors over 12 years. They also will create jobs for workers in support fields such as IT, already in short supply.
‘Entire landscape’
“It’s across the entire landscape,” said Guillermo Moreno, vice president in Kissimmee, Florida, at Manpower Inc.’s Experis Healthcare Practice unit. “It’s a growing concern and a growing issue. There’s huge fracture at all levels.”
On the I.T. front, health-care systems, data companies and other industries in need of talent all are competing for the same workers, he said. The U.S. economy may create as many as 758,800 new computer and IT jobs, a 22 percent increase, from 2010 to 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its outlook on job growth, released in March.
A growing portion of those tech positions will be in what the BLS calls “health care and social assistance,” which will account for about 28 percent of all new jobs in the U.S. economy by 2020. The industry, which includes public and private hospitals, nursing and residential-care facilities, and individual and family services, may increase by a third, or 5.7 million new jobs, twice as many as any other industry, the report said.
Adding Urgency
Looming deadlines and federal funding add urgency. The shift to electronic medical records is being driven by $20 billion in stimulus spending. In 2015, Medicare reimbursement rates will be cut by 1 percent for doctors not meeting the federal standards for those records.
Responding to demand, the industry is re-educating workers for the new I.T. requirements, said Norma Morganti, executive director of the Midwest Community College Health Information Technology Consortium. Morganti, based at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, coordinates one of five regions in an 82- school federally-funded national effort.
The program is designed to train at least 10,500 new specialists in a curriculum that typically can be completed in six months or less.
The Midwestern consortium, which coordinates 17 community colleges from Minnesota to Ohio, has enrolled 6,700 students, Morganti said. More than 3,700 have graduated, toward a goal of 5,000 by March 31. Data is not yet available on placements.
Experienced Students
Many of the students already had more than 10 years’ experience in either health care or information technology and are using the classes to get the expertise they lack in the other area, Morganti said. Of those students, 17 percent had a master’s degree and 39 percent had a bachelor’s degree.
Insurance exchanges slated to come online in 2014 are adding demand for I.T. and other workers, said Les Funtleyder, president of Poliwogg in New York, who has written a book on investing in health care.
The online marketplaces, which will link customers to insurance plans, will need computer programmers to build them, and customer support staff to run them, he said.
States must say by Dec. 14 whether they will set up their own insurance exchange or rely on the federal government, and have until Feb. 15 to join a hybrid state-federal exchange.
“The second these exchanges go up, they are going to need to hire,” Funtleyder said. “This could create a ton of jobs.”
State Exchanges
Companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Xerox Corp. are looking to build states’ insurance exchanges. Armonk, New York-based IBM is working with Maryland and Minnesota on theirs and acquired Curam Software Ltd. of Ireland last year for technology to help develop the programs. Xerox, based in Norwalk, Connecticut, said in September it won a $72 million contract from Nevada. Neither company would comment on how many employees they are adding or have working on the health-insurance exchanges.
Accenture Plc of Dublin won a $359 million contract in June from California to create its program.
Among other companies staffing up is Maximus Inc., said Bruce Caswell, president of the Reston, Va.-based company’s health care segment, which provides administrative support to government health plans. Maximus expects to begin adding employees next year to help states manage their exchanges, he said.
October 2013
Once the insurance marketplaces begin operating in October 2013, thousands of customer-service and administrative workers will be needed, Caswell said. As many as 900 call-center jobs per state will be needed, particularly for those with a high number of uninsured, he said. Caswell declined to say how many workers Maximus plans to hire. Employment in the company’s health-services unit rose 16 percent to 5,634 at the end of September from the same period a year ago.
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