And most of those in attendance apparently are looking to hire new people. There's a lot of recruiting going on at the show, according to Lieber, with “every CIO, consulting firm and vendor here looking for staff.”
Lieber made his comment in reaction to a key finding from the survey, which found that healthcare IT executives identified the “lack of staffing resources” as the No. 1 barrier to implementing information technology in their organizations.
The survey is based on a poll of 302 senior-level IT executives working primarily at hospitals conducted in December 2011 through January 2012. Some 92% of respondents were either directors of IS or IT or corporate or facility-level CIOs.
Some 21% of the respondents cited lack of staff as their most significant barrier to IT adoption with the lack of adequate financial support coming in second at 14%.
Jennifer Horowitz, the senior director of research for HIMSS Analytics, said the result was the first time that something other than lack of financial resources topped the annual survey's ranking of IT barriers. Horowitz presented the survey findings at the briefing.
The highest-ranked business objective of IT adoption was meeting “meaningful use” criteria to be eligible for IT incentive payments from the federal government, cited by 24% of the respondents. Coming in second at 21% was improving patient care.
Read the full HIMSS survey results here.
The results mirror the findings of Modern Healthcare's annual IT survey, which were released Feb. 20. You can download the results of Modern Healthcare's annual IT survey here.
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