51,000

Number of additional healthcare IT workers that will be needed in the U.S. over the next five years, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

As hospitals gear up for full , they are facing a significant shortage of qualified IT personnel. Accenture conducted a study on and concluded that the push for electronic records will require one full-time healthcare IT worker for every five hospital beds. That translates into a need for roughly 155,000 full-time healthcare IT workers in the U.S., which is some 45,000 more than the current number of IT professionals in healthcare, according to a Gartner estimate.