Health I.T. Job Growth Has Been Underestimated?

New data from an analysis of online job postings confirms that employment growth in health information technology (HIT) has even further exceeded projections, driven by funding from the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. In addition, two other reports show that the job market for those working with electronic health record (EHR) and related systems continues to be strong for employees and challenging for employers.

In the new analysis, Schwartz and colleagues used a comprehensive database of 84 million online job postings,  extracted out those related to HIT, and built a model aiming to determine the influence of HITECH [1]. The authors limited their focus to jobs that would be defined in the realm of clinical informatics. Although this was important for their goal of assessing the influence of HITECH, from the perspective of a biomedical informatics graduate program director like myself, this excluded other important informatics jobs, such as those in imaging informatics, bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, and other areas where a graduates of our program are employed.