Healthcare Human Resources Shortage - Right Around the Corner

With Health Care Reform coming down the pike, it makes me think of the magnitude of work that we in the Healthcare Industry are working through right now and the huge amount of work that awaits us.  In addition to keeping our Health Insurance Plans current by slowly updating some of our internal system to realize some efficiencies that new technology provides, we are also faced with many government mandates.  For example, we are looking at 5010 by 2012, ICD-10 by 2013, Health Care Reform varied dates through 2016 and in Massachusetts we are working through Small Business Rate Regulation.  All these efforts are gigantic and the number of human resources alone to get this all done will be many.  There will be an issue in the next couple of years of being able to obtain and secure people to work on all these initiatives.  In the Healthcare industry, when we hire for Healthcare resources, we require prior experience in Healthcare.  We all have a start in healthcare and for me, I had to buy a car, drive 60 miles one way each day and get underpaid in order to get into Healthcare.  I tell people that it's like when we hire a Janitor, we even prefer the one that has worked in Healthcare before.  Though sarcastic, there is some part of truth to this.  So with all the initatives that we must implement in the next couple of years, we will have a hard time in the Healthcare Industry to retain good Human Resources.  My suggestion to solve this issue is that we need to start to look outside of Healthcare and hire talented skills and pair these people up with workers already in Healthcare that can direct, so that we can increase the volume of workers in the Healthcare workforce.