Big Data and Potential Future Trends

Big data and computer programs continue to dominate the healthcare industry, hospitals and healthcare providers are going to have to conform the rising trends. As we get more data to sort through, health providers will likely have to hire more IT workers and coders, and make several adjustments in order to compete in tomorrow’s healthcare industry.

From Datacenters to Data Clouds

Now that there is more data available, it is becoming more important to sort, and store the data so it can be available at any point in time. Hospitals will have to work on moving data from its current databases to new data clouds and step up their security regulations on them. It is important to protect their patient’s information from cyberterrorist or anyone who is seeking to obtain their information illegally. Regulations will need to be created when it comes to moving data from one point to another.

Along with security and regulations on the new data clouds, hospitals and healthcare providers will need to maintain high ability of service even if the datacenters are hacked or destroyed by some natural event.

Hospital IT Staffing

All of these pain points for hospitals in the new big data era clearly require more IT staffing. In hospitals, IT staff has been growing in recent years: in 2008, hospitals employed an average of 24 full time IT employees. In 2012, they now employ around 35. As staff sizes continue to grow, the workload is growing even faster as well. There are many more health systems being developed, as well as ICD-10 coming out in October of 2015, which is going to employ more than 140,000 codes, compared to the just over 17,000 codes employed by the current standard ICD-9.

The necessity for better performance is creating a demand for technology workers with skill sets better suited to a more agile environment, or a more datacenter based environment. IT managers are going to be hiring application development IT workers, help desk/IT support workers, business intelligence and analytics specialists, and security coders. Creating healthcare applications is increasingly important in order to keep up with personalized medicine.

Medical Coding in Demand

Healthcare providers are also looking for more Medical coders to translate the details of a patient’s records into code and analyze them. According to Torrey Barnhouse, president of TrustHCS, a health-information service provider, there is a constant 20 to 30 percent shortage of medical coders. Medical coders can be trained easily and only require a few hundred hours of coursework on physiology, anatomy and pharmacology. They will be useful for working with the new, more complicated ICD-10.

 

 

Healthcare providers and hospitals are looking to hire more IT workers as they continue to use more data and produce more healthcare applications. Most of the healthcare company is going to look towards staffing more IT specialists in the near future in order to work on managing datacenters, moving datacenters to cloud storages, creating health apps to better monitor patients health and in order to give their patients better technology to improve their service towards them.