August 20, 2009

By MILT FREUDENHEIM

Health care may be a costly drag on the economy, but it’s still a great place to find a job.

Midcareer managers and other workers have been migrating to health care jobs for years, of course. Now, with the recession, the lure is even stronger. Hospitals, which employ more than four million people, added 135,000 jobs last year and 19,400 more in the first half of 2009, even as millions of American workers wound up unemployed.

“The demand for talented leaders in health care is only going to go up,” predicted Jane Groves, a senior vice president at Integrated Healthcare Strategies, an executive search and consulting firm in Kansas City, Mo. “All that demand can’t and shouldn’t be filled by people already working in health care.”

Frank Pinkowsky worked as a manager at DuPont for 24 years before taking a position as senior vice president for human resources at the Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, Pa. “Don’t underestimate the value of what you learned working for someone else,” he advised.

Colin Ward, a 37-year-old Baltimore hospital executive, also successfully switched careers, leaving ESPN after eight years of producing sports broadcasts. “I felt like I wanted to be contributing in some other way,” he said.

After 11 months of graduate classes in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a year as a paid apprentice at a Baltimore hospital, he had a master’s degree in health science and management.

Mr. Ward stayed at the hospital, Lifebridge Health, for three more years and in 2007 moved to his current post at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Md., as director of corporate strategy. Still a big sports fan, he produces Ravens football games for WBAL radio on weekends.

The Hopkins school, which also offers a three-year master’s of public health degree, is the largest of dozens of accredited graduate and undergraduate programs in hospital management. Many managers with experience in fields like human resources, finance and marketing find a welcome in health care, with a little studying up. Online courses, books, journals and professional magazines provide material.

The American College of Healthcare Executives, based in Chicago, offers several online pages of career tips, including a two-year-old salary summary at www.ache.org. The Association of University Programs in Health Administration also lists contact information for many schools at www.aupha.org.

“We just recently recruited a vice president for human resources from the supermarket industry,” said Mike A. Helm, a senior executive at Sutter Health, a hospital chain with 45,000 employees in Northern California. Sutter hires 20 to 30 executives a year.

Health care does, of course, have its own jargon and a host of complex challenges. Managers have to know how to deal with doctors, nurses and professional groups, as well as with regulators.

“There are tons and tons of regulations, and the burden is growing,” said Dr. Steven A. Wartman, president of the Association of Academic Health Centers, a nonprofit group whose members are both research and health sciences universities that include hospitals.

The Obama administration’s $19 billion 10-year campaign to promote electronic medical records opens another huge opportunity, said Dr. Blackford Middleton, a technology research expert at Partners Healthcare in Boston. An estimated 40,000 to 160,000 additional health information professionals could be needed, he said.

Dr. Middleton is helping to develop an executive education course at the nonprofit American Medical Informatics Association and a certificate course at the Harvard School of Public Health. online, and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health sponsors some informatics fellowships.

The industry trade association, known as Himss for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, offers an array of online courses that can help technology workers move into health care. Last month, Himss established its eLearning Academy, which, it says, “offers round-the-clock, on-demand access,” allowing students to work at their own pace on subjects like clinician-focused use of information technology, I.T. customer service to the health care user, and health care I.T. strategic planning.

James Platts, 30, chose a more formal academic setting for his training in health care management and completed the joint master’s program in business and public health at the University of California, Berkeley. He now works on health-related projects in the San Francisco office of the Boston Consulting Group.

He came to Berkeley in 2006 from the White House, where he was a junior-level staff member at the National Economic Council for two years. A Harvard graduate in economics, he also put in two years at Nasdaq, studying financial and economic data.

“I thought it would be fun and interesting from a health care perspective to live in California for a few years,” Mr. Platts said, referring to California’s large-scale health care issues and solutions.

Graduates of the Berkeley program are hired at an “average salary somewhat over $100,000,” said Kristi Raube, director of the joint health management program there. Tuition has tripled since 2007, to $35,893 for California residents and $45,093 for out-of-state students pursuing the joint master’s degree.

“Of course, nobody knows what will happen with health reform,” Dr. Wartman noted. One possibility could be pressure to cut costs by freezing hiring and squeezing out management jobs at hospitals and health insurers.

But, he said, “there is a very strong push to cover more people, with a lot of implications for growth in the health care work force.” Other drivers of growth, Dr. Wartman said, include “the continued march of science and technology, as well as uninvited developments such as new diseases.”