Editor
Dr Ahmad Risk 

HIE Library Archive 1998/9  

IT staffing shortages are one of the top seven major IT industry trends currently influencing the health market, says Dave Perri, Senior Vice President with SMS Corporation in the United States.

The others are a demand for services; the emergence of Windows NT; the expansion of the Internet; network computing and the re-centralisation of systems management and what Mr Perri called "ubiquitous computing".

Mr Perri said issues relating to the Year 2000 date change and European Monetary Union did not appear on the list of current industry trends "because they are not trends, they are a phenomenon".

The health industry was particularly vulnerable to the shortage of IT personnel where for every 100 IT staff vacancies that required filling there were only 85 people qualified to do the job, he said. The position was exacerbated by the fact that IT was not a core competency in health organisations; their competencies had to do with medicine.

Mr Perri said services had taken over from hardware or software as the number one IT demand. He also predicted that in the next five years Windows NT would become the dominant operating system in terms of volume in Europe, followed by IBM NVS and Unix Solaris from Sun. There were already 227 different suppliers providing 353 separate NT applications for the health industry and many of these were small, fledgling companies. This was "very exciting" because the smaller companies brought brilliant innovation into the healthcare industry, he said.

"We may not be happy about these trends but it is vital to understand what the inevitable is and capitalise on it and go after it", said Mr Perri. "The key is to understand that these trends can be viewed as a necessary evil or as a strategic weapon to help us do our expansions, increase our revenues and maintain our strategic position in our businesses and to improve quality of healthcare across the world".

Mr Perri was speaking during a four day conference organised by SMS and the Fundacion Universidad Complutense at El Escorial, north of Madrid and which focused on health and technology in the threshold of a new century.