Health-tech sector faces labour shortage

Skills must change `very quickly': report

Canada's healthcare sector is facing a shortage of digitally skilled labour as demand for health services increases and the sector adopts new technologies, according to a new report from the Information and Communications Technology Council.

The report, released Thursday, said Canada's health and biotechnology sectors are a “key innovation area” for the economy, with new developments in healthcare tech necessary to contain ballooning healthcare costs. And demand for digitally skilled labour is already on the rise, with job postings related to health-tech jobs exceeding 60,000 in May, up from less than 50,000 in December 2019.

ICTC projects the overall demand for health-tech jobs could hit 119,000 in 2022.

The pandemic has only strengthened demand as Canadians increasingly accessed healthcare online and private players saw new opportunities in the market. “We saw skills needs change very quickly for healthcare professionals (during the pandemic),” said Mairead Matthews, senior research and policy analyst at ICTC. “Even on tech teams, a lot of startups we spoke to, we heard that their products pivoted … (because they) saw a new opening they could address.”

However, the report noted, both private and public sector healthcare employers face challenges to recruiting and retaining digitally skilled talent. Such workers are already in high demand across many sectors of the economy, spurred on by the past year of working, shopping and connecting from home.

The report mentioned numerous healthcare executives, particularly in the public sector, experiencing difficulty finding and retaining tech talent, citing the inability to match salaries in other sectors.

As well, Matthews said, there's a shortage of “specific talent with an understanding of the technical and the (health-care) domain. A lot of the time what we heard from employers is they go for one or the other and just plan on teaching the rest … and hope that they adapt quickly.”

ICTC emphasized the importance of developing multi-disciplinary teams that can integrate both tech and health expertise. “Somebody would have had to have done a whole lifetime in software development and then another lifetime in the health-care field to create a product that's useful and viable,” said Matthews. “So just having development teams where … everyone has enough knowledge of each other's pieces so they can communicate properly and account for that need of two lifetimes of knowledge (is crucial).”

Matthews said this challenge is particularly acute for the public sector: not only do employers need staff with both tech and healthcare knowledge, but a comprehensive understanding of how the organization works, whether it's a hospital or a heart clinic.

“Where you can get that is a health-care professional that's already worked there for some time … who's curious and wants to experiment,” she said.

But the sector's high levels of unionization can prevent professionals from testing out new technical roles and skill sets, as they could risk loss of seniority or pension and other benefits.

“We heard these things from the manager level and workers,” Matthews said. “It wasn't clear in those hospitals whether they would implement

WE HEARD THESE THINGS FROM THE

MANAGER LEVEL AND

WORKERS.

changes to account for that, but it's something to look into.”

The report called on academic institutions to ensure medical students have the ability to learn technology skills and students in tech programs have the opportunity to stream into a focus on health care.

Some programs in digital health and bioinformatics are emerging, but Matthews said these learning opportunities should be available on a more casual basis, given many software developers and other tech workers only take an undergraduate program before joining the workforce.

The sector's hiring challenges may be stymying tech adoption, the report said. Canada's health sector already lags on this metric in comparison to international peers, with a 2019 Commonwealth Fund International Health survey finding the percentage of Canadian doctors sharing information electronically and allowing patients to book appointments online was below half the Commonwealth average.