How Will The Economic Stimulus Package Affect Healthcare Jobs?

Josh Rossheim writes in www.allhealthcare.com about how the economic stimulus package may affect healthcare jobs.....and the future appears very bright! Read on:

"With billions of economic stimulus dollars flowing to healthcare, American workers can expect a burst of job creation in the industry in 2009 and beyond, including new positions for clinicians and professionals in key support areas.
The numbers are impressive: More than 200,000 clinical and nonclinical jobs could be created by healthcare stimulus spending, according to government estimates. And that’s in an industry that continued to increase hiring through 2008, a year of recession: Just over 5.6 million healthcare and social-assistance hires were made in 2008, more than in any other year this decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Where will the jobs be? All over the country, in many care settings and in many healthcare industry sectors, but most significantly in these three:
• Healthcare information technology. • Medical and allied-health training. • Community health.

Healthcare IT Jobs Will Get a Huge Boost
President Barack Obama sees healthcare information technology (HIT) in general, and electronic medical records (EMRs) in particular, as keys to improving the quality of care while reducing costs. Working with Congress, the president secured a major investment in HIT when he signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law.
As a result, tens of thousands of IT professionals will be hired into the following roles, according to Richard Howe, a vice president of HIT consulting firm Healthcare Informatics Associates: Developers who create or customize EMR software for hospitals; systems integrators who bring together a multitude of legacy applications; IT trainers; and clinical consultants — RNs, lab technicians, pharmacists and others — who will apply their knowledge of hospital operations to the implementation of EMR systems.
HIT projects will require software engineers, analysts and technicians, as well as IT and IS managers. Their expertise will be deployed on projects including medical informatics, consumer health informatics, healthcare management software and healthcare information security. “There will be a significant demand for tech workers with strong security credentials,” says Steven Ostrowski, a spokesman for CompTIA, a technology industry association.
Many HIT jobs will be open to experienced IT professionals from other industries. “By the nature of the evolving discipline of HIT, there’s a lot of learning on the job,” says Thomas Horan, an associate professor of information technology at Claremont Graduate University.
But a host of other healthcare systems jobs may require specialized academic training. Institutions such as Claremont are ready with a master’s program in health IT, while DeVry University offers degree programs in healthcare information systems and technical management with a health information managment specialty.
When will the HIT jobs begin to flow? “The money will start to become available in late 2010 or early 2011,” Howe says. “But if a hospital wants to take full advantage of the federal funding, they have to be ready with a qualified EMR system, and that takes two or three years.” For that reason, many hospitals will quickly ramp up their efforts to lay the foundations for EMRs.

Dollars for Training Nurses and Other Practitioners
The Recovery Act will help aspiring healthcare workers start or complete their training.
Stimulus funding includes $200 million for nursing workforce development programs and health professions training programs. This funding may supply scholarships for nursing-school applicants or supplement financial support for current nursing students. “These dollars will enable many nursing students to finish their education on time,” rather than suspend their studies due to financial difficulties, says Suzanne Begeny, director of government affairs for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
The stimulus package also addresses the critical shortage of nursing faculty with a loan repayment program to encourage advanced-degree nursing students to consider teaching. Right now “nursing schools can’t take in more students because of the faculty shortage,” Begeny says.
The stimulus also includes $500 million in primary-care workforce funding for programs such as the National Health Service Corps, which gives doctors, dentists and other practitioners a financial incentive to work in underserved rural and inner-city areas.

Medical Jobs in Community Health
The Recovery Act also includes money to boost primary care at community health centers, which typically serve the uninsured and underinsured and collect from patients only a small percentage of the cost of services rendered.
Stimulus money for the nation’s 1,200 community health centers “should create about 8,000 jobs,” says Dan Hawkins, senior vice president for policy and programs at the National Association of Community Health Centers. These jobs will include doctors, dentists, pharmacists, RNs, nurse aides, lab technicians, outreach workers and drivers.
Of those 8,000 new jobs, 5,500 had already been created by mid-March 2009 with $155 million in stimulus funds, according to Health Resources and Services Administration spokesman David Bowman.
The Recovery Act also includes $85 million in funding for the Indian Health Service to develop projects such as telehealth services. "

Economic Stimulus Funds Will Benefit Small E-Records Companies

This article by Jacob Goldstein (www.wsj.com) discusses the potential windfall profits as E Records become a necessity in medical facilities, both large and small:

"Big companies including General Electric Co. will likely profit from the billions of federal stimulus dollars going to doctors who buy and use electronic health records. But little-known niche players could be among the biggest winners.
One such company is eClinicalWorks, a closely held firm in Westborough, Mass. The company, founded a decade ago by computer-programmer Girish Kumar Navani, his cousin and his physician brother-in-law, now has about 750 employees and expects $100 million in revenue this year. In the next few years, the company plans to hire 500 more people, up from 150 before the stimulus bill was approved.
"As of Dec. 31, we had put together a game plan saying, 'This economy looks like it's really getting bad. Why don't we be a little bit prudent?'" Mr. Navani says. "It changed in four weeks to, 'You will hire for growth; forget hiring for need.'"
The $787 billion stimulus package Congress approved in February promises more than $20 billion in outlays for health-information technology, coming mostly between 2011 and 2015, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. Physicians using electronic records will be eligible for more than $40,000 each in Medicare incentive payments over several years starting in 2011. Hospitals can also qualify for millions of dollars in incentive payments. Doctors and hospitals not going electronic by 2015 will be subject to penalties.
"We never anticipated the kind of dollars we're talking about today -- never in our wildest dreams," says Steven Plochocki, chief executive of Quality Systems Inc., a publicly traded company that sells electronic records under the brand NextGen.
An electronic health record, sometimes called an electronic medical record, replaces a patient's paper file. EHR systems can incorporate safety features such as automatically alerting a doctor if a patient has prescriptions for drugs with dangerous interactions. Proponents believe EHRs can also reduce wasteful spending from unnecessary testing, help doctors spot trends in their practices and enable agencies such as Medicare to pool anonymous medical data to track public-health issues.
Skeptics say that sharing information electronically will require the creation of complex data networks. Worries about patient privacy also persist. And many physicians say the systems can be expensive and difficult to use. The cost often runs to tens of thousands of dollars per doctor in the first year -- and several thousand dollars a year after that.
A federally funded survey published last year found that only 13% of practicing doctors used a basic EHR system, and only 4% used what the authors called a "fully functional" system.
Key details of how the money will be distributed remain undecided. To receive incentive payments, doctors must demonstrate "meaningful use" of a "certified" EHR, but the legislation leaves those terms to be defined by federal officials.
GE has been in the health-equipment business for decades, but it didn't start selling EHR systems to doctors until 2002, when it bought a system from another vendor. The business is already growing at a rate of 15% to 20% a year, says Jim Corrigan of GE Healthcare IT.
But the labor-intensive aspects of adopting and maintaining electronic systems in doctors' offices can give smaller technology companies an opening to compete against big corporations, says Eric Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.Shares of publicly traded specialists such as Quality Systems, Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions Inc. and Cerner Corp., have outperformed the broader market this year. Earlier this month, eClinicalWorks gained a national distribution channel when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it will begin selling eClinicalWorks EHR packages to medical offices through its Sam's Club stores.
The installation of Dell Inc. computers and training by eClinicalWorks staff will cost a physician $25,000 for the first year, with the option of adding additional doctors in the practice for $10,000 each. After the first year, the price will fall to about $5,000 a doctor annually.
Mr. Plochocki of Quality Systems says consolidation among vendors is likely, and he says that his company is considering a few acquisitions this year. Quality Systems has also been beefing up its sales force, he says.
Allscripts is using its business selling billing software to doctors as a jumping off point, selling EHR systems to its existing customers. Glen Tullman, the company's CEO, says a physician customer recently explained why he would rather buy both billing software and an EHR system from a single vendor: "If something goes wrong, I want one throat to choke," the doctor said."

Boston Doctors donate money to save layoffs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Another interesting post by Sarah Rubenstein in today's Wall Street Journal Healthcare Blog. Check it out:

"Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston are reaching into their own pockets to try to help shore up the hospital’s finances.
The Boston Globe reports that the heads of 13 medical departments say they’ll donate a combined $350,000 to the hospital — about $27,000 from each one’s annual pay — to further cut down on expected staff layoffs.
Hospital CEO Paul Levy, who has been engaging in a very public dialogue about the hospital’s budget woes, said earlier this week that he expects about 150 layoffs. He had anticipated about 600 before finding alternative cost-cutting ideas.
The department heads also sent out a note soliciting contributions from about 1,100 doctors, the Globe reports. Some of those doctors are on staff, while others are affiliated with the hospital but not employed by it.
“In my two departments, I’m quite confident that the great majority of physicians will participate. I don’t know at what level,” DeWayne Pursley, chair of the Department of Neonatology and acting chair of obstetrics and gynecology, told the Globe. “People have their own personal issues. Personally, I have three kids in college.”
Levy, for his part, posted emails from hospital staffers expressing appreciation for the doctors’ help. "

Can Google Track Track Trends in the Outbreaks of Diseases?

Jacob Goldstein of The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google can track trends in outbreaks of diseases. This is a very interesting notion and one in which you want might to pay attention.
"Last summer, for a month before Canadian officials announced an outbreak of listeriosis that would kill some 20 people, Google searches seeking information on the disease were on the rise.
That finding, published this week in Canadian Medical Association Journal, is the latest sign that public-health types are trying to figure out how to mine Internet search data as a potential early-warning system for disease outbreaks.
Think of it as a wonkier example of Google Flu Trends, the tool Google.org rolled out last fall to mine Americans’ search patterns in an effort to track flu outbreaks.
There is a certain, basic logic to all this. You find out someone in your family has listeriosis, you go home and Google it. Multiply that across an outbreak, and it will add up. Interestingly, researchers found that searches for “listeria” — a less technical term for the disease, which is caused by eating tainted food — rose only after the official announcement, perhaps in response to media stories that used the term.
The authors point out some important unanswered questions about how public-health officials might actually use data from the likes of Google. There would likely be lots of false alarms, as factors other than a true disease outbreak prompted search spikes. And it’s unclear just how much of a spike from baseline levels would warrant further investigation.
What’s more, the potential false alarms might spook the public. Google already offers Google Trends, which lets anybody see how the volume of searches for a given term changes over time.
The paper was written by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Ottawa Health Research Institute. The Harvard author has received research funding from Google.org as well as the National Institutes of Health."

Will Employer Based Health Care Benefits Decline in the Next Ten Years?

Vanessa Fuhrmans of the Wall Street Journal reports that research indicates that trend in employer paid health care benefits may decline over the next 10 years.

"The 30% plunge in health insurers’ shares in recent weeks is an index of how seriously Wall Street believes President Obama’s health-reform agenda will ultimately upend private-sector insurance. Now comes a pair of surveys that indicate more of Corporate America anticipates the end of health-care benefits as we know them, too.
According to a survey of 489 large U.S. employers out today, 62% said they were confident they would still be offering their workers health coverage 10 years from now, down from 73% last year. The economic crisis one reason for the drop; the prospect of a new and much different health-insurance system was another.
“This is the first time in the 14 years that we have conducted this survey that employer confidence declined, and it is not related to an increase in cost trends,” said Ted Nussbaum, a director at Watson Wyatt, an employee benefits consulting group, which conducted the survey with the National Business Group on Health.
A employer poll released last week by Hewitt Associates, a rival consultancy, echoes the sentiment. Though the majority of the 340 big employers surveyed had no immediate plans to change their health coverage strategy, one-fifth said their aim is to move away from directly providing health benefits in the next three to five years — up from 4% in 2008 and none in 2007."

Obama Stimulus Package Includes New Human Resources Requirements

From BLR Business and Legal Reports, February 17, 2009:

"On Tuesday, February 17, President Barack Obama signed an economic stimulus package that includes a COBRA subsidy for laid-off workers and other HR-related provisions.
Both chambers of Congress approved the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act late last week. The final version of the legislation includes a COBRA subsidy for laid-off workers. The subsidy will be 65 percent of the COBRA premium for a period of 9 months--employers (or health plans if they administer COBRA benefits) will receive a credit against payroll taxes to offset the subsidy. The premium subsidy will cover workers who were affected by involuntary terminations occurring between September 1, 2008, and January 1, 2010.
There is an income threshold as an additional condition on an individual's entitlement to the premium subsidy during any taxable year. Taxpayers with gross income that exceeds $145,000 will have to repay the entire amount of the premium subsidy. For taxpayers with gross income between $125,000 and $145,000, the amount of the premium subsidy that must be repaid is reduced proportionately.
The legislation requires that information on the COBRA subsidy be included in COBRA notices. Under the legislation, the Department of Labor will create a model notice within 30 days of enactment.
The legislation also includes other HR-related provisions. For example, it increases weekly unemployment benefits by $25. The legislation also provides an extension of the temporary emergency unemployment compensation program (which provides up to 33 weeks of extended benefits) through December 2009. Under the program, no benefits will be payable for any week beginning after May 31, 2010. The legislation also provides unemployment compensation to workers who leave an employer for "compelling family reasons," such as domestic violence, illness or disability of an immediate family member, and the need to accompany a spouse to a place from where it is impractical to commute and due to a change in location of the spouse's employment. The Department of Labor will define immediate family member."

The Relationship Between Staffing Firms and Staffing Buyers in Today's Economy

This post comes from a blog by Jon Osborne. It confirms why staffing buyers and staffing firms establish long term business relationships.

"At last, staffing buyers have staffing firms at their mercy. The economy is in shambles. Staffing firms are cutting internal staff and offices. Many such firms, mom & pop outfits especially, will go under in 2009. Competition for the now shrinking pie of staffing business is fierce. This is the best opportunity in years for staffing buyers to finally stick it to their staffing suppliers.
That thought is no doubt occurring to at least a few people. We all want to save money, especially in these times. Anyway, all's fair in love, war and staffing—right?
It would be fair, even practical and desirable, if this were a marketplace of innumerable ever-changing entities, like the stock market or commodities exchange. But staffing is about ongoing relationships—a long series of repeated transactions between people—and in a relationship you want to last, you need to preserve your partner.
A sizeable portion of the staffing community will be challenged for survival this year. Buyers may want to think, not just about doing business with their preferred suppliers, but about keeping those suppliers in business—not just out of soft and fuzzy feelings but because preferred suppliers are preferred, and also because the more suppliers there are, the more competitive and responsive the marketplace.
Buyers say they want staffing suppliers to be true business partners—not just vendors. This is the year—the greatest opportunity in a long time—to reach out and establish that partnership, not just with continued business deals, but by letting your suppliers know what is or isn't coming down the pipeline, so they can adjust internal resources as needed.
Take a genuine interest in the survival of your staffing suppliers in this troubled time, and you will win real personal loyalty, and establish a true partnership—an intangible asset that will pay tangible dividends."