US healthcare industry scouts for tech talent in India

Healthcare needs engineering talent, but with a resource that is in high demand but often scarce in the U.S., this has caused health systems to look at IT talent across the globe, particularly in India.

“One thing that healthcare doesn’t have is a lot of custom development engineers, and trying to find that talent in the U.S. and compete with U.S. companies just wasn’t happening,” BJ Moore, CIO of Renton, Wash.-based Providence, told Becker’s. “We’re able to compete for that talent successfully in India.”

Moore said Providence has about 1,400 people in India, with 80% to 85% of them being traditional IT employees. They help run things such as business intelligence, big data, artificial intelligence engineering, network operations and cybersecurity.

The CIO said the workforce in India has been able to provide Providence with increased agility.

“If I’m sitting in Seattle and I’ve got a problem and it’s five o’clock, it’s going to wait until the next morning,” Moore said. “But when you have a team on the other side of the world, you can hand that problem off to that team so by the time you come in in the morning, those problems have already been solved. It’s an agility that you can’t put a price on.”

Other health systems are also seeing success with this. Providence helped hire individuals from India for Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based AdventHealth.

“Our big growth is selling India as a service,” Moore said. “Advent is our first customer, and they’ve been really pleased with what they’re building out there.”

But Moore said this move of hiring tech talent outside the U.S. doesn’t mean jobs are being outsourced.

“We didn’t lay people off,” he said. “We hired those roles in India based on attrition, and people really like the handoffs. The teams in India appreciate the teams in the U.S. and the teams in the U.S. appreciate the teams in India.”

As far as this becoming a trend in the healthcare industry, Moore said “it has to be.”

“We saw an opportunity. Most other industries hired international operations 20 to 30 years ago and it has been core to all Fortune 500 companies,” he said. “Really, healthcare has missed the boat. We think this is really the only way. We started with India and we’re looking at other countries as well.” Becker’s Hospital Review