By Dan Schubert, CEO & Co-Founder of Revuud
Healthcare IT projects rarely stall because of technology. They stall because leaders can’t consistently access the right expertise.
That’s one of the clearest takeaways from a recent conversation on This Week Health featuring Joe Longo, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Parkland Health, and Eric Utzinger, CCO & Co-Founder of Revuud. Their discussion surfaced a reality many healthcare IT leaders know all too well:
The traditional healthcare IT staffing model is no longer built for how modern health systems actually operate.
Between AI initiatives, EHR optimization, cybersecurity priorities, analytics projects, and nonstop operational demands, healthcare IT teams need access to specialized talent faster and with more flexibility than ever before.
And yet, many organizations are still relying on staffing models that were built for a different era.
Healthcare IT staffing is the process of sourcing specialized technology talent to support healthcare organizations with initiatives like EHR implementation, cybersecurity, analytics, system optimization, infrastructure, and digital transformation.
That talent may be brought in for:
But while the need for healthcare IT staffing continues to grow, the way many organizations access that talent hasn’t kept up.
Healthcare IT staffing refers to how health systems, hospitals, and provider organizations find and engage technology professionals to support critical IT functions.
That can include roles such as:
Some organizations hire these professionals as full-time employees. Others engage them as consultants or contractors for a specific project, timeline, or workload need.
And that distinction matters.
Because for many healthcare organizations, the need isn’t always:
“We need a full-time person for the next 3 years.”
More often, it’s:
“We need someone with this exact expertise for the next 8 weeks.”
That’s where healthcare IT staffing becomes essential.
Healthcare IT has become one of the most complex operating environments in the enterprise.
It’s no longer just about keeping systems online or supporting the help desk.
Today’s healthcare IT leaders are being asked to simultaneously support:
At the same time, many teams are dealing with targeted skill shortages, not just general staffing shortages.
That’s an important distinction.
As Joe Longo shared during the conversation, the challenge isn’t simply “we need more people.” It’s that healthcare organizations often need very specific expertise at very specific moments in time.
And that’s where the traditional model starts to break.
For years, healthcare IT staffing has largely been handled through traditional staffing firms and staff augmentation vendors.
And to be fair, those firms still serve a purpose.
But many healthcare CIOs are starting to realize the model comes with real friction.
One of the frustrations discussed in the interview was something many healthcare leaders have experienced:
You request help for a role… and then receive the same resume from multiple staffing firms, often at different price points.
That creates confusion, slows decision-making, and makes the process feel less strategic than it should.
Joe put it well: traditional staffing is often “individual-based,” not company-based.
In other words, you may work with the same firm and get:
That doesn’t always mean the firm is bad. It just reflects the reality that healthcare IT staffing has historically been built around brokering individuals, not creating a transparent, repeatable talent strategy.
In many traditional staffing relationships, organizations don’t have clear visibility into:
That matters, especially in an environment where healthcare IT leaders are under pressure to move quickly and manage budgets responsibly.
Healthcare IT needs are increasingly fast-moving and specialized.
When you need someone for:
…the old “submit resumes and wait” model starts to feel painfully inefficient.
“This is not aligning with the right partner. It’s aligning with the right individual for the need at the time.”— Joe Longo, CIO at Parkland Health
A common question is: Why not just hire more full-time employees?
The short answer: because many healthcare IT needs are temporary, partial, or highly specialized.
Joe described this especially well in the conversation.
At any given time, health systems may have 100+ IT projects running simultaneously, each requiring different levels of support across different skill sets and phases.
That means leaders often aren’t trying to solve for:
They’re trying to solve for realities like:
And in those situations, hiring a full-time employee often doesn’t make sense.
Healthcare IT staffing is no longer just about filling seats.
It’s about precision access to expertise.
One of the most important themes from the interview was this:
Many of today’s initiatives are:
Instead of only seeing 18-month “rip and replace” initiatives, teams are increasingly supporting:
Joe noted that these projects are often hitting faster and requiring very specific resources for a finite period of time.
That means the staffing model has to evolve too.
If traditional healthcare IT staffing is increasingly misaligned with how health systems operate, what should replace it?
The answer isn’t necessarily “never use staffing firms again.”
The better answer is:
Healthcare organizations need more flexible, transparent ways to access and manage specialized IT expertise.
That includes a few important shifts.
Instead of relying entirely on intermediaries, hiring managers increasingly want the ability to:
That creates more confidence in the match and reduces unnecessary friction.
Healthcare IT leaders need visibility into:
That kind of transparency becomes especially important when budgets are tight and every engagement needs to be justified.
Not every need requires:
Sometimes the right answer is:
Modern healthcare IT staffing should support that reality.
This is one of the biggest strategic shifts.
Instead of restarting the staffing process from scratch every time a need comes up, healthcare organizations should be able to build and revisit a known network of trusted external experts.
That creates:
The bigger takeaway from this conversation is that healthcare IT staffing shouldn’t be treated like a one-off procurement exercise.
It should be treated like a workforce strategy.
That means moving from a model centered around:
…to a model centered around:
That shift is becoming more important as healthcare IT leaders are asked to do more with less while still keeping projects moving.
And for many organizations, that’s exactly why the old model is starting to feel harder and harder to defend.
In the This Week Health conversation, Joe Longo described how his team didn’t force a wholesale shift overnight.
Instead, they introduced another option.
They gave hiring managers more visibility and more flexibility, then let them choose what worked best for their needs.
Over time, usage naturally increased toward the more transparent, flexible model because it better matched how real healthcare IT work gets done.
That’s an important point.
The future of healthcare IT staffing likely isn’t about replacing every existing model with one new one.
It’s about giving healthcare organizations better options for when the traditional approach doesn’t fit.
And increasingly, that’s happening more often than many teams realize.
Healthcare IT staffing is still essential, but the way organizations access specialized IT talent is changing.
The teams that adapt fastest will be the ones that stop thinking about staffing as a transactional process and start thinking about it as a strategic operating capability.
Because in today’s environment, access to the right expertise is no longer a nice-to-have.
It’s part of how healthcare organizations keep projects moving, reduce delays, and execute at the pace modern healthcare demands.
Want the full conversation? Watch the interview featuring Joe Longo, Eric Utzinger, and Bill Russell from This Week Health to hear the full discussion on how healthcare IT staffing is evolving.
If you’re exploring a more flexible, transparent way to access healthcare IT talent, you can also learn more at www.revuud.com.
Healthcare IT staffing is the process of sourcing specialized technology professionals to support healthcare organizations with projects like EHR implementation, cybersecurity, analytics, infrastructure, and digital transformation.
Healthcare IT staffing often includes EHR consultants, application analysts, project managers, cybersecurity specialists, interoperability experts, data analysts, ERP consultants, and infrastructure resources.
Staff augmentation is one form of healthcare IT staffing. It typically refers to adding external resources to support an internal team, often for a specific project or short-term need.
Many healthcare CIOs are looking for more transparency, more flexibility, faster access to specialized expertise, and more control over how external talent is sourced and managed.
Contract or project-based healthcare IT talent is often a better fit when the need is specialized, short-term, part-time, or tied to a specific initiative rather than an ongoing full-time function.
Healthcare organizations can build a more flexible IT workforce by combining full-time employees with trusted external experts who can be engaged quickly for targeted needs, specialized projects, and fluctuating capacity demands.
Dan Schubert is the CEO of Revuud, an AI-powered platform that helps healthcare organizations find, engage, and manage specialized IT talent. With deep experience working alongside healthcare IT leaders, Dan focuses on helping CIOs build more flexible, transparent, and scalable approaches to managing external IT consultants. His perspective centers on improving how health systems access expertise to execute critical initiatives faster.