Where will healthcare IT find the techies?

If the implementation of electronic health records matches the hype, it will revolutionize healthcare delivery in the United States. The new generation of electronic health records will be expensive and very complex, requiring the people who run them to possess strong critical-thinking skills and a hybrid set of abilities and experiences from the clinical, business, and IT sectors. Where will we find them? It's not clear how many people will be needed to make HIT run effectively. Some studies have estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 new HIT workers will be needed, but those estimates were made before the federal government in February committed nearly $20 billion to HIT implementation in the stimulus package. David Hunt, MD, CMO in the federal Office of HIT Adoption, says the flood of HIT funding could make the workforce shortage issue more acute in the short-term, as hospitals and other healthcare organizations struggle to make the 2011 deadline to meet the as-yet undefined "meaningful use" requirements for HIT.