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by vkou 2414 days ago
> And most hospitals can't jack up the pay to compensate

I find that hard to believe in an age of $100 saline bags, $20,000 childbirths, and 15-minute-long $500 specialist visits.

3 comments

You’re downvoted likely because the high expenses of hospitalization speak more to inefficiencies in healthcare supply chain and the economics of insurance and really has nothing much to do with how much hospitals can afford on IT. Some hospital systems are rich... but they’re not that rich.

That said I agree (based on 1st hand experience) that the larger healthcare multibillion dollar systems in the US can afford to pay more for better IT/engineering. There is simply little incentive to do so. And further it’s more than just hiring a few engineers with FAANG pay... these institutions are organizationally not suited to engineering. Changing this would not be easy for them...and no, we don’t need a hospital run like Facebook or Uber.

Then there are the tons of smaller systems in the US.. they cannot afford high priced engineers regardless of the pre-insurance line charge for a bag of saline.

Earlier in my career I interviewed for a health IT job that was basically a director level position. The pay ended up being less than I was making as a government employee for a smaller scoped job. The government gig was probably less than an intern makes at a FAANG.

In medicine, doctors are king. Everyone else is a peon.

Doctors don't feel like they are kings--while they make very good money there are massive amounts of red tape, filling out Epic...

It's the bureaucrats who are kings.

My doctor friends confirm. They would rather spend their time on patient care but have to make a lot more time for the paperwork.
Much of that cost has to go to people who cannot pay for healthcare and the massive amounts of bureaucracy managing multiple contradictory medical billing codes by company.