The first article in this series laid out the challenges in recruiting programmers to digital health firms and who tends to make a strong contributor in those firms. Now we can cover the strategies companies use and the arguments they make.
Make an Important Difference in Society
Dean says that many programmers choose health IT over other industries because they want to do something positive for humanity. The programmer may have suffered a health crisis, or seen family members go through one. In any case, they find more meaning in health IT than retail, finance, or social media.
Dean’s observation matches what I’ve seen interviewing managers in health IT over the years. Many made their money and built their expertise in other industries, then decided to do a reset and launch a new career in health. And many managers told me they use social impacts as an incentive to recruit tech staff. Anmol Madan, co-founder and CEO of RadiantGraph, calls the mission the “most important piece” of recruitment.
Equity is an important related value: Show that your solution will improve outcomes for people who have had trouble getting health care because of race, gender, geography, culture, or disability.
Jimmie Poeng, director of solutions at Dedalus, believes that health IT is intrinsically appealing to good job candidates: “Healthcare, especially in the U.S., is ripe for disruption. The opportunities to innovate and make a real impact on people’s healthcare experiences is as bountiful as it is rewarding. With U.S. healthcare spending around 20% of GDP, there are long and deep career opportunities for software engineers to flex their creative problem-solving muscles.”
Ramona Powell, senior vice president of people operations at the digital health development firm CliniComp, says “Gen Z prioritizes work-life balance, a sense of community in their company, and the satisfaction of knowing they are working for a company with a social conscience. CliniComp delivers on all these expectations and provides our employees with the opportunity to innovate in a field where our differentiating product features have direct impacts on patient care. As part of a highly adaptable and agile company, our employees express satisfaction about working in small teams and hearing frequent feedback about the importance of their work and their personal contributions.”
Powell adds, “We have recently earned the Great Places to Work certification through feedback surveys from our employees based on their real experiences as part of the CliniComp team. A great work experience covers the entire employment life cycle. We value the bonds we build at work and want our team to stay with us and build their careers here, for themselves and their families.”
Conventional job postings are not enough for the highest tier of senior developers and other tech staff, according to David Mulligan, who is executive vice president of technology at Carenet Health. He says, “Although technical managers may produce amazing technology, many struggle to develop an eye-catching job description. Job descriptions are often too bland, list too many required skills, and don’t provide insight into how exciting the opportunity may be for the candidate. Recruitment should be more of sales process than a selection process and includes painting a picture of future possibilities, a commitment to innovation, and a culture fit.”
For skills that are piping hot these days, such as current AI technologies, you need to recruit directly and aggressively, the way companies recruit a new CEO. Mulligan finds that this level of talent is attracted mostly by the chance to innovate creatively with the best tools and practices. The social mission of a digital health company is secondary.
Use Up-to-Date Technologies
Several managers also said that you need to show that you’re investing in the best tools for programmers. This is true for all tech companies who want the most talented staff, not just digital health companies. Managers need to understand modern software engineering and DevOps strategies, the role of cloud technologies and architectures, how different disciplines such as data science and data engineering fit in, and so forth. Brian Fugere, chief product officer of symplr, calls this investment “showcasing your commitment.”
David Mulligan, executive vice president of technology at Carenet Health, says that great tech tools are important but only a means to an end. “Use of leading technologies may be what companies lead with,” he says, “but a sense of fulfillment that employees gain from doing work that’s meaningful to them can have more impact.”
Patrick Schiess, President and Chief Information Security Officer at Darena Solutions, highlights how AI tools, cloud platforms, and other rapidly advancing technologies are transforming the programming landscape. He observes that software engineers will spend less time on traditional code-writing tasks. Instead, the developer’s role is evolving to emphasize security, architecture, and automation.
Madan points out that hospitals and other traditional health care environments tend to under-invest in computer technology. Managers in those settings are used to seeing software engineers as a back-office function with costs instead of earnings potential. He expressed hopes of “avoiding a clash of cultures” between clinicians and computer tech staff.
Stephen Dean is co-founder of Keona Health. When a hospital does come up with useful software, he says, it tends to be a boutique solution that’s hard to generalize and market to other companies. It’s also expensive to maintain, so eventually the hospital gives up and licenses software from outside. (I’ve also seen that happen.) Dean is a fan of free and open source software, which allows everyone to customize the product to meet their needs.
The final article in this series will cover how to make developers as productive as possible, which also improves retention.
