Just a year ago, one in four medical practices offered any kind of electronic health records (EHRs) to their patients. By the end of 2012, however, that ratio will have changed significantly.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) mandates a full roll-out of EHRs by 2014. Healthcare employers who do not fulfill the
requirement face cuts in Medicare reimbursements.

With the stakes so high, it’s no surprise that some have predicted a healthcare recruitment shortfall of 50,000 healthcare IT workers in the next few years.

Yet IT recruitment for HITECH is not so simple. It requires that hiring managers recruit — not just for tech skills — but also for clinical, change management and other surprising job skills that don’t necessarily include EHR certification.

“Healthcare IT is different than IT,” says Pamela Lane, vice president of health informatics at the California Hospital Foundation. “Complying with HITECH is not about IT. IT is a component, but so is workflow redesign, data analysis and many other things.”

In other words, healthcare IT staffing for HITECH is about more than computers.

Searching for Multi-talented IT Talent
As a career development specialist at Oregon Health and Science
University in Portland, Ore., Virginia Lankes fields requests from healthcare
hiring managers of all stripes.

For HITECH recruitment, she finds that hiring managers are looking for data analysts with community outreach skills, project managers with leadership and IT skills and IT staff with clinical experience.

“There are so many settings for EHRs that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” she says. “It depends on the employer.”

The healthcare IT outsourcing company CareTech Solutions requires clinical experience for all its new IT hires, says Kim Whitman, CareTech’s vice president of human resources.

Thomas Yackel , MD and head of medical informatics at Oregon Health and Science University Medical Center, looks for healthcare IT staff among clinicians. Yackel taps  current staff and the hospital’s informatics residencies and preceptorships.

“It’s easier,” he says, “to train people on the IT side than to take someone who doesn’t understand how an operating room works and teach them that.”

Tapping the Graduate Pipeline
Just as some have partnered with schools to retain their health care professionals, some healthcare organizations have formed strong bonds with local universities to find the right talent for HITECH jobs, creating a pipeline of candidates with tailor-made training.

CareTech, for instance, works closely with Detroit-based universities such as Walsh College and the local chapter of the University of Phoenix to tailor curriculum to their needs. Recruiters will often sit in on these classes to assess which candidates will be successful in their jobs.

CareTech then provides part-time internships to potential new hires while they’re still in school. Most of these people, Whitman says, are midcareer workers who are taking classes at night or on weekends.

“Our average new hires have seven years in the industry. So we’re getting people
with experience as well as up-to-date training.”

Consider Nontraditional Candidates

Unlike hospitals, not every healthcare organization requires clinical experience for their HITECH hires.

County health departments, for instance, may need a data analyst who is also outgoing enough to do community outreach. Consultancies may need IT staff who can also be good leaders and who are willing to travel.

Across all these positions, some surprising job skills can be just as important as having a computer science degree.

Whitman, for instance, has begun to recruit communications majors — with and without IT training — as IT project coordinators.

“If you can’t communicate verbally and in writing, you fail from the start,” she says.
“Some clients are willing to take that risk to train the person in their system once they’re there.”

A More Timely Recruiting Process
Not long ago, some healthcare companies may have held out on filling a position until they found a perfect candidate. With HITECH, that’s changed, says Boston-based account manager Jessica Doherty of Queen Associates.

Doherty finds that the IT staffing shortage means that employer must act more quickly with healthcare hiring decisions.

“Organizations are a little more flexible with their rates and the skillset they’re looking
for now,” she says.

They’re also offering incentives, from robust 401(k) plans to tuition reimbursement.

“IT staff wants to be trained. They want to know what new version is coming from the
vendor,” says Whitman. Her company keeps funds on hand specifically to send
hires for additional certifications.  “The more we invest in training, the stronger our hiring and employee retention numbers are.”

Look for Agile Candidates
While the demands of HITECH hiring have increased the need to
recruit and hire candidates more quickly, it has also increased the need to
scrutinize a candidate’s job skills, employee
productivity and ability to manage change, says Lane, of the California Hospital
Association.

She recommends asking candidates about their ability to both create and adapt to change in the business environment early on in the interview process.

“The goal of HITECH is to transform healthcare. It’s about safety. It’s about
availability of data. It’s about reducing healthcare costs. It’s about multiple
layers of ingenuity. It’s about trying to get busy people to change the way
they do something,” she says.  “If they look at you like you’re speaking Greek when you ask these interview questions, they aren’t the right candidate.”

Congratulations, Jessica!

11thAnnualAwardfinalists_12-08-11pg1

About Queen Associates, Inc.

Queen Associates is an award-winning information technology services firm with a history of serving clients through expert consulting services and talent identification since 2000.  As a certified Women’s Business Enterprise, our core business provides the best talent to our clients, while promoting the hiring of veterans and minority candidates.  Our service delivery model provides individualized support for our clients and candidates and results in enhanced quality, retention and efficiency.  www.queenassociates.com

Applications are now being accepted for the $2,000 Kasie Capling Memorial Scholarship, awarded annually to a female Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools student who is a rising college freshman accepted as a Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM) major at an accredited college or university for the Fall 2012 semester.

The applicant’s grade point average must be a minimum of 3.0/4.0.  The application is available online at  www.GetSmartGetWise.com and is due no later than March 15, 2012.

Requirements play a vital role in the development of technical systems; however, it is well known that the top reasons for project failure are tied directly to poor requirements.  Requirements are captured and communicated to the technical team through the leadership of the business analyst.  Yet because the work that business analysts perform is often ad-hoc and undocumented, the quality of requirements can vary widely and is dependent on the skills of the particular business analyst involved.  

This situation – the importance of excellent requirements combined with the lack of a consistently applied best practice approach –  has sparked a demand for a consistent, repeatable business analysis approach throughout the system development life cycle and has fueled the recognition and growth of the business analysis profession.   A recent search for business analysis jobs on a popular jobs site returned 149,289 job postings; clearly the demand for BAs far outpaces the supply.

Closing the business analysis skills’ gap requires that companies look beyond the walls of their organization to acquire business-analysis talent to staff immediate needs.  At the same time, they can work toward establishing a support structure necessary to grow business analysts internally.  It’s a dual approach:  a combination of strategic outsourcing accompanied by organizational improvement with the objective of developing bench strength.  And it’s this dual approach that the partnership between Queen Associates and DEA is intended to address.

DEA brings over 20 years of helping clients narrow the gap in understanding between business and the IT staff through consulting services supported by a best practice approach to the requirements life cycle. At the core is DEA’s “Business Analysis Center of Excellence” program that provides for business analyst skill assessment, use of a proven process for the requirements life cycle and of a set of business analysis tools to streamline requirements documentation, collaboration, and management, and a customized training program to close skill gaps and increase business analyst competencies.

Queen Associates provides consulting and IT staff augmentation and complements DEA’s BA best practices framework with a cadre of experienced senior business analyst consultants who possess the competencies necessary for delivering world class business analysis solutions. All business analyst consultants will complete DEA’s BA boot camp, have experience in using BA tools to define and manage requirements throughout the project, and be able to apply the DEA approach to the project.  The end result will be to improve the efficiency of analysis work and to allow requirements to be sustained and reused, saving significant costs on future projects.  

“This partnership is truly a winning team for our clients,” said Doreen Evans, President and Founder of DEA. “The client benefits from access to the best practices and tools that we have built over the past 20 years, while also gaining access to highly qualified business analysts and requirements engineers from Queen Associates to boot-strap projects.”

 Robin Pugh, President of Queen Associates, states, “Our customers are looking for solutions to critical business problems. Working with DEA enables clients to address two important elements in parallel namely, establishing their competency center while getting business critical projects completed on-time, under budget and meeting business objectives.”

Together DEA and Queen Associates provide a winning combination with DEA bringing the processes and tools needed to ensure the quality of the BA work on projects and Queen Associates providing highly qualified business analysts to carry out those projects. Clients can also arrange to establish their own center of excellence by working side by side with DEA and Queen Associates on real projects that are used to pilot the establishment of a requirements life cycle solution and a competency center for business analysts.

One of DEA’s recent clients says, “We brought in DEA to build the next set of requirements to support our new business initiative and to build a rigorous, business-driven requirements process. The results have exceeded our expectations.  Requirements are owned by the business unit, IT has delivered functionality that aligns with the business need, and we are well on our way to being self sufficient in the discipline of requirements engineering.”

A senior executive at a major financial institution says, “Queen Associates is one of the best kept secrets in Charlotte in terms of IT professional services. In addition to providing exceptional talent with business analyst and project management skills, they also have a strong understanding of our business and technology priorities which makes them spot-on in identifying the resources that will best accomplish the deliverables at hand.”

About Queen Associates, Inc.

Queen Associates is an award-winning information technology services firm with a history of serving clients through expert talent identification since 2000.  As a certified Women’s Business Enterprise, our core business provides the best talent to our clients, while promoting the hiring of veterans and minority candidates.  Our service delivery model provides individualized support for our clients and candidates and results in enhanced quality, retention and efficiency. www.queenassociates.com

About Doreen Evans Associates, Inc.

Doreen Evans Associates, Inc. (DEA) is a consulting firm committed to business analysis and requirements excellence.  DEA helps organizations establish, institutionalize and maintain best-in-class business analysis competency, and offers experienced business analyst practitioners to fill the skills gap found in many companies.  DEA is aligned with the International Institute of Business Analysis® (IIBA®) and incorporates IIBA best practices into a practical approach to fit the unique needs of each client.  Founded in 1992, DEA is wholly committed to the business analysis profession, using and continuing to improve a best-of-breed Requirements Life Cycle Process, enabled by robust and comprehensive BA tools and delivered by highly proficient, professional business analysts.  www.doreenevans.com 

We honor Kathleen and other survivors and victims of 9/11.

Her old neighborhood’s not the same

By:  Tommy Tomlinson, ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com

NEW YORK – Kathleen Britton is back visiting from Charlotte, and we’re walking around her old neighborhood. This is the pocket park where kids play soccer, and over here is where the nice Chinese place used to be, and here’s the esplanade where you can see the big Colgate clock on the other side of the Hudson River.

It’s a warm and lovely Saturday in New York, and there’s not much better than walking in New York on a beautiful day.

We go into an atrium called the Winter Garden and up a set of gorgeous marble stairs. At the top, there’s a glass wall and a railing. People are leaning on the railing, looking out.

Kathleen has been talking the whole time. Now she’s quiet.

Finally, she says: “This is where it was.”

The hole that used to be the World Trade Center spreads out before us.

Today, 10 years after 9/11, we will try once again to fill that hole. There will be a long ceremony here at the World Trade Center site where people will read the 2,977 names of everyone killed in the 9/11 attacks, plus six killed in the World Trade Center attacks in 1993.

They also will grieve in Washington, where a plane hit the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pa., where another jet crashed into a field and where they dedicated a memorial on Saturday. But the world’s attention will center on New York. Here is where the terrorists caused the most deaths, in the biggest buildings, in the most famous city on the planet. You can sum up the impact of 9/11 in five words: Our towers crumbled and fell.

Except Kathleen Britton can’t quite see it that way. Because to her the towers weren’t symbols or icons. They were where she shopped.

“Duane Reade, the drugstore, that’s where you get your Target-type stuff,” she says. “Godiva chocolates – soooo good. All the restaurants we could just walk over to. It was like the neighborhood mall.”

Kathleen grew up in Charlotte, graduated from South Meck and then UNC Chapel Hill. After working a few years, she came to New York to get an MBA from Columbia and started working for investment banks. She stayed in New York for 20 years.

By 2001 she was working for Merrill Lynch and living three blocks away in Battery Park City. Forty years ago the neighborhood didn’t exist; it was built on landfill from construction sites, including the dirt and rock excavated to build the World Trade Center. Kathleen had a condo on Rector Street and could see the twin towers from her bedroom window. They were only about 400 yards away.

She was about to leave for work on 9/11 when she heard the loud whine of a jet. She knew that noise, in that part of the city, wasn’t right. But she looked out the window and didn’t see anything. She couldn’t see that the first jet had hit the north tower on the opposite side from where she lived. By the time she got downstairs, she saw the flames.

She had almost made it to her office when she saw the second jet flash overhead, just before it struck the south tower.

She wouldn’t let herself be scared. She showed visitors where to go to find boats to get off Manhattan. She walked back home and called her mom. She was looking out her window when the south tower collapsed. Debris flew in all directions. A dust cloud covered the windows. Then, she was scared.

She remembered the nuns at St. Ann’s back in Charlotte telling her it was OK to make an emergency confession. She figured she was about to die. So she took a shot.

Now she closes her eyes and she can see all the shoes on the esplanade. People ran right out of their shoes.

Ten years later, so much has changed. Merrill Lynch, crippled by 9/11, laid Kathleen off at the end of 2001. She eventually came back to Charlotte and now consults for companies including TIAA-CREF. She never works on Sept. 11.

At first she came back to New York every couple of months. Now it’s been two years. They’re rebuilding at the World Trade Center site – not just a memorial, but four new skyscrapers, including one that will rise to 1,776 feet – even higher than the twin towers.

But right now it’s hard for Kathleen to see anything but the absence: “If you weren’t here, and didn’t live here, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to have two 110-story buildings rising over everything, as part of your neighborhood… and then to not have them
there.”

New York is still New York. You can hear 12 languages in line at the deli. A room-service omelet costs 25 bucks. Over at the Winter Garden, there’s a read-a-thon for kids – and all of a sudden they turn it over to a punk band called Care Bears on Fire. “OK,” the lead singer says, “the name of this first song is ‘Barbie Eat a Sandwich.’ ”

New York is still New York. But not completely.

Kathleen Britton, survivor, looks out over the railing at where the World Trade Center used to be. It’s full of construction cranes and dump trucks and men in hard hats.

But looking at it now, from up so close, it’s hard to see how they can ever fill the hole.

Tommy: 704-358-5227; ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com;
facebook.com/tommytomlinson; Twitter @tommytomlinson; blogging at
ttomlinson.blogspot.com

Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/09/11/2597316/her-old-neighborhoods-not-the.html#ixzz1XrFDVQGP

Event Info:

The Greater Charlotte Heart Walk will be held on September 17th, 2011 in Center City Charlotte at the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets. The Heart Walk is the American Heart Association’s largest fundraising event in the Charlotte metro area, attracting 11,000+ participants and raising $1.5 million dollars to fight heart disease and stroke. Educational, wellness and children’s activities begin at 7:30 a.m. and the three-mile walk
through beautiful Uptown begins at 9:00 a.m. Water stations and snacks will be available.

The Queen Associates Team will be meeting at 8:45am in front of
our building, 129 West Trade Street (corner of Trade and Church Streets).

Frequently Asked Questions:

Where is the walk? The Walk starts and finishes at the intersection of Trade & Tryon Streets in Uptown Charlotte. There will be three Wellness Communities that focus on the
following topics: Create Hope, Inspire Change and Celebrate Success. Each community will be on a different corner of Trade and Tryon Streets.

What time does the walk begin? The Wellness Communities and Check-In will open at 7:30a.m. and the walk officially begins at 9:00a.m.

If you are interested in joining the team, please register at www.CharlotteHeartWalk.org/QueenAssociates.  Please notify us immediately after registration with you and your participant’s T-Shirt size! T-Shirt orders will be due by Sept 5, 2011.

We look forward to seeing you there!

You can read The Art of Negotiation and more interesting articles online in Today’s Charlotte Woman.