Nashville is singing the tune of health care and IT. The Middle Tennessee area has a plethora of IT jobs available, particularly in health care IT, according to the Nashville Technology Council’s Q1 2011 Technology Hiring Trends Report.
The council created the report along with Vaco Technology, a technology and finance staffing firm. Nashville can be described as the Silicon Valley of health care IT, according to J. Tod Fetherling, president and CEO of the council.
"We have the largest concentration of health services management in the entire country," Fetherling told eWEEK. "35 percent of all health care management decisions get made in Nashville every day."
In total, 925 IT jobs are available in Middle Tennessee, according to the report. These positions include 652 in Nashville and 206 in Memphis.
At the heart of the Nashville health care IT community is HCA (The Hospital Corporation of America), with 42 IT jobs open in the hospital system.
"Much like Dell really helped Austin move along and Intel helped create Silicon Valley, we’ve got HCA and CHS [Community Health Systems] that are having the same impact on our community," Fetherling said.
CHS had 28 positions, according to the report. Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital and Deloitte also had several openings in health care IT.
"Nashville ranked 11th in the country this quarter in creating jobs with about 16,000 jobs created," Fetherling said. "Most of those were in health care IT."
The biggest need for IT workers in the Nashville area was for developers, with 290 positions available. In addition, 292 analysts were needed, along with 132 vacancies in management, 52 for Web developers and 44 for database professionals.
Although 28 positions were available on help desks, those jobs are harder to fill, according to Fetherling, who noted that the community has difficulty finding graduates in science and technology.
For more, read the eWEEK article: Silicon Valley Nashville Sings Praises of Health Care IT Jobs.