How Does Shortage of Health IT Professionals Impact on the Digital Health Transformation?

Abstract

The need for software suppliers to react swiftly to the plethora of application requests and constantly shifting market requirements is one of the major problems facing the health IT business in the context of digital health transformation. This can only be achieved when the necessary staff and resources are available. The objective of this work is to identify challenges health IT companies are confronted with related to personnel capacities and skilled workers. Using a questionnaire distributed through newsletters and social media among representatives of software companies and hospitals we collected information on current hurdles of health software providers and their strategies to overcome these in order to address the demands of the digital health transformation. The main findings of the survey are that scarce resources in software development are among the reasons for not achieving strategic goals on time in the health IT sector and for not being able to react flexibly to market changes. A strategy to overcome missing expert knowledge and own resources without free capacity is to hire external resources. With the ever-changing landscape of digital health, it is essential to have skilled workers with knowledge on the peculiarities of clinical workflows. The existing shortage of skilled workers leads to a reduction of innovative power in the health IT sector, potentially slowing down the digital health transformation.