Hospitals Computer and Math Jobs Keep Going Up
As we digitized healthcare, so have hospitals increased their hiring of for non-medical folk. From 2010 to 2014, there was a 17.9 percent increase in the number of computer and match science positions in hospitals. Wow. The ratio of patients per nurse goes up but we have a massive hiring spree on techies? How has this helped medical care? Probably not much. Most of this tech work is to fulfill useless mandates, appease administrative bureaucrats and get good grades on quality metrics that have never been proven. I predict a day, not that far off, that there is going to be more of these computer and match science personal in hospitals than there are nurses. You heard it here first.
There are already more non-clinical employees in hospitals than clinical. Have you seen the parking lots on the weekends? Nearly Empty. But the number of patients in the hospital hasn’t changed. All those empty parking spots represent mostly non-clinical personnel.
C’mon, Doug, you know where this is heading.
Soon everyone will be issued their own little BP/pulse/temp/SpO2/glucose monitoring device by their health insurance company, which owns their doctor’s office, and will be required to use it in conjunction with a smartphone app whenever they need medical care:
Log on, transmit vitals, answer questions through question tree, transmit photos of face, lesion, rash, etc. (for computer analysis and interpretation), and have your prescription electronically transmitted to the drug store, or an ambulance dispatched to your GPS location.
Health care facilities will have almost no doctors, and will employ tech people almost exclusively.
Think I’m kidding?
You are certainly not kidding – that is what society increasingly claims to prefer.
The biggest tech breakthrough is the sentence on the contract – “Use at your own risk. Not a substitute for examination by licensed healthcare professional.” That’s revolutionary! Of course, if you dump the risk on the patient, you save beaucoup dollars, no matter what you do. Missed grandma’s volvulus, baby’s meningitis? Oooh, too bad – so sad! Now that’s progress! Still, don’t go into tech – go into finance and insurance for the big money.
Actually I think that would be a good thing. Take out the automatic read of results and interpretation but I think we would all be better if all the nonsense data collection was handled by the patient and we didn’t need to actually have an office to practice out of except where needed. I would MUCH prefer to use a video teleconference connection in my living room to talk to a patient then to have to go to the office wait for the staff to get the data collected and then clean up the room etc.
The future should be video based but that doesn’t mean we should be hiring all these tech people. I have waited for an Oncology PA for now going on 2 years but the hospital says we can’t justify it with 5 docs in a group …..
BUT we spent 126 MILLION dollars on a customized version of a software package that we installed in 2011 and now in November are going to toss it out in favor of a better program from a commercial off-the-shelf vendor but of course no discount for lost expenses in training 38 campuses and THOUSANDS of employees/doctors/admin/etc.
We went from patient care focused to data collection focused in some miraculous misconceived notion that if we collect enough we will no longer need us and that the computers will do it better. I have played with Watson and trust me it is no way close to replacing a doctor at his/her daily function. SURE it is GREAT at coming up with differential diagnoses that any resident can do even the Zebras but narrowing it to the needs of the specific patient still needs colds and a warm heart.
Dr D
Does anyone know where I can find a current breakdown of where the health care dollars are being spent? Out of every dollar how much goes to physicians, administration, tech, nurses, pharma etc. etc..