What are the hot skills in healthcare IT in 2012? If you answered database administrators, project managers, or EHR software development and maintenance, you may be thinking of the functional or industry-specific skills that have traditionally been core hiring requirements for IT staff. But things are changing. The newest emphasis in healthcare IT is on so called “soft-skills,” not only for people in these traditional roles, but for entirely new roles such as change agents and CNIOs — Chief Nursing Information Officers.
According to a 2012 IT research study and salary survey (InformationWeek), a recent development is the active recruiting and hiring by Kaiser Permanente of behavioral science Ph.D.s to work with the IT team to help the organization assess its processes and offer expertise in change programs. According to CIO Phil Fasano, “Behavioral experts tend to look at change or workflow with a different eye.”
Recruiters may also be asked to find candidates for CNIO or Chief Nursing Information Officer roles. According to Mary Beth Mitchell, CNIO at Texas Health Resources, CNIOs are the “newest members of the C suite. They bridge the gap between nursing and IT and are often involved with the planning and deployment of clinical applications and other nursing-related IT.” Emphasis in this role is relationship building amongst key leaders and departments.
How are organizations defining “soft skills,” and why are they particularly in demand in the healthcare IT industry today? Soft skills are those behavioral competencies that enable individuals to interact with and influence others, be they teammates, customers, suppliers, or management. Skills such as effective written and verbal communication, influencing, negotiating, conflict resolution, team building, and strategic thinking top the list. Here’s how they come into play in the workplace.
Consider the situation faced by a small medical practice that purchased an electronic health records system and hired a project manager who had solid knowledge of the functionality of the software and experience in training end users. The physicians believed that they had everything they needed to move from a paper-based system to an electronic one very quickly. They soon learned that this might be easier said than done.
In this practice, once the software was installed, the PM held an orientation session for five of the office staff and the six MDs who would be using the new system. Fortunately for this practice, their PM had significant strength in multiple soft skills, since this is what he faced during the orientation:
It took a great deal of explanation, clarification, influence, understanding resistance to change, one-on-one training, coaching, and using change champions to make progress and complete this implementation — none of which could have been accomplished without the PM’s ability to influence and help people change their behavior.
Whether healthcare environments are small practices, large hospitals, network providers, or institutions within the payer community, whenever there is a system change, the change will always impact the processes and the people. Talent with strong soft skills and the ability to handle the people side of change will be worth their weight in gold, and experience with soft skills as tools for business-problem solving should be significant value-adds on any candidate’s resume.