They are really the bridges between our customers and the technical challenge of writing the code. Those business analysts tend to come from across a broad spectrum of backgrounds. They are people who have a number of years of healthcare experience: They are nurses, pharmacy people, people who have worked in the labs, radiology, across the gamut. It is the business analysts who have made the difference in making our EMR process work.
Do you often hire IT professionals from outside of health care?
We're in a situation today where we really don't compete for staff with the hospital down the street. We do compete with the commercial enterprises in Houston, the airlines and oil and gas companies.
How hard is it to find the right IT professionals for an environment where the safety and lives of patients depend on information technology?
We used to attract very strong IT people from the financial services industry. We would bring them into our hospital, give them a tour and show them the patients. We would tell them that the patients were their customers and that what they did on a day-to-day basis directly impacted the patients. That message typically lasted in their minds about two years because they discovered that when they came to work in health care, they were working the same hours they worked on Wall Street, but instead of getting a big bonus and a 15 percent salary increase at the end of the year, they received a 3 percent increase and very small bonus. So at the end of two years, the panache of working in health care started to wear off.
The flip side is that as a dedicated cancer facility, we attract a number of staff who have had family members treated here, who may themselves have been treated here or who know somebody who has been treated here, so that is a plus for us. The mission of M.D. Anderson is what attracts and keeps people. We try to utilize that as we recruit and hire staff.
What types of positions are you currently looking to fill?
We focus a lot on business analysts. We focus a lot on project managers. We have a whole career ladder built for project managers. We look for people for our more sophisticated projects or people who are certified as project managers. We also look for people with deep technical experience, whether it is managing huge data farms or complex network environments. We try to match experience and expertise with the particular domain people will be working in.
You are the hiring manager for several different areas, including clinical care and operations, research and education, financial and support services, and infrastructure standards. Do you hire differently for these different areas?
On the clinical side, the answer is yes. As I mentioned earlier, we don't hire people right out of college. We look for people who have several years of experience, both in whatever technology they're working in and also in health care. That is particularly true on the clinical side of the house. Our director of the data center, for example, has been in health care for about 25 years. The person who heads our clinical applications support group is a nurse.
On the financial side, healthcare experience is not so critical. The person who heads our financial group has been a financial services consultant for a number of years, but not specifically dedicated to health care. On the research side, we hire PhDs who come from chemistry and biology, etc., so that's sort of a stretch. In some ways it is health care, but we're looking more for the domain expertise that they bring from their own individual research. So yes, we do hire differently for our different constituencies, and we try to match the expertise and experience that an individual brings with the particular area that they're working in.
Can you describe your interview process for candidates
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