CARLSBAD, CA – It's unclear whether the timeline for implementing electronic health records to receive federal incentive payments will create demand for EHR products and services between now and 2012.

Regardless, healthcare IT companies are making sure they have enough healthcare IT consultants to implement their systems.

Medsphere Systems, an open-source software provider, recently launched its Medsphere University, a certification and training program that will enable business partners to implement OpenVista, its EHR product.

MaxIT, Medsphere's first certified IT partner, recently trained 16 of its staff through the program and will also represent Medsphere and OpenVista in the market.

Rather than a shortage of healthcare IT workers, Medsphere COO Rick Jung says he's seeing a "glut" of interest, which he attributes to the economic recession and the attraction of open source's value proposition - paying for services and not tools. OpenVista's six to nine-month go-live cycle is also a more economical option over the years of implementation required for traditional EHR systems, he said.

John Hummel, CTO of Perot Systems' Healthcare Group, holds a different view. The number of people who have completed successful electronic medical record implementations is few and far between, he said. "There are still a lot of jobs out there for certified EMR consultants," he said, despite the lull as the industry waits for more details on the HITECH Act of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Case in point: Perot Systems created its Healthcare Academy a few years ago to train college graduates around the globe. The program has achieved a 100 percent placement rate, he said.

"There's definitely going to be a problem; it's a mathematical issue," Hummel said, to have enough people in the pipeline to install EMR systems by 2012 to receive the full federal incentive payment and even by 2015 when penalties kick in. What will compound the healthcare IT worker shortage is the fact that some 30 countries, including China, have computerized health record initiatives with roughly the same timeline as outlined in the HITECH Act, he said.

Hummel pointed out that there are strategies to deploy to ease the crunch. For one, he said, it's easier to take clinicians and train them in IT than it is to take engineers with no experience in healthcare and train them for the industry.