Health Fidelity is a healthcare startup that developed natural language processing (NLP) software to help payers and providers analyze electronic medical records, claims and administrative data, and medical images to uncover risk factors hidden within clinical charts. The goal is to support risk adjustment for health plans and hospitals for value-based care payment models. In a Q&A via email, Health Fidelity CEO Steve Whitehurst talked about how his business is dealing with the challenge of hiring qualified data scientists and other technology staff for his business with competition not only from other healthcare startups but also established technology companies moving into healthcare.
Note: This exchange has been lightly edited.
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Are health tech startups generally hunting for technology professionals with healthcare experience? Or is it more about bringing coding, software development, and data scientist skills from other industries into healthcare?
We start most, if not all, of our talent searches looking for experience in healthcare tech — ideally, in our payer/provider domain with NLP, informatics, or risk adjustment specific expertise. However, when hiring for software developers/tech staff, we do relax our criteria because finding industry and domain experience is very difficult. In those roles, we hire for domain talent and leverage the other functional (product, engineering, etc.) and commercial (sales, operations, marketing) experts within Health Fidelity. Those roles support our client engagement models and assist in training and developing team members without healthcare expertise.
Steve Whitehurst, Health Fidelity CEO
Has it become easier or more difficult for startups to hire tech staff with a deep pool of experience in healthcare?
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I came to Health Fidelity three years ago but I’ve been in healthcare tech for the better part of my career, and in today’s market it’s become much more difficult. Depending on location, it’s almost impossible to find certain tech and healthcare talent. We have a great track record for hiring and retaining tech talent, especially compared to Silicon Valley — our average tech retention rate is more than twice that of Apple or Google. But over the last year, our ability to hire tech labor quickly and within budget has been incredibly challenging.
What are the most sought-after roles among health tech startups? Has supply been able to keep up with demand? Is flexible or remote working helping companies widen their pool of applicants for these roles?
Data science and machine learning is a very hot area for AI tech start-ups. Clinical informatics is also high in demand and is critical to building analytics in the healthcare space. Most clinical informatics roles require formal medical training, preferably at an MD level, so finding a physician dedicated to informatics and data analytics makes it even more difficult. We are competing with consumer companies like Google, Amazon, and Uber and the talent supply is not keeping up with demand. Those companies typically have larger budgets, bigger data sets, and appealing brands while [health IT] is still behind in technology compared to consumer businesses. To compete, your message has to be very compelling to pull talented data scientist, NLP, and machine learning candidates away from the consumer market. People with a humanistic underpinning are drawn to our mission and purpose and are excited about joining a startup team culture that is passionate about improving healthcare.
For sought-after roles, what trends have you picked up on in recent years?
The education sector has noticed the shortage and recently, there has been some improvement in this skillset coming out of schools. We are leveraging our networks in academic and clinical institutions to recruit, but we aren’t the only ones doing that. To fill some gaps and to speed development efforts, we rely on an outsourcing and contract labor strategy where we leverage technical staffing to support our core technical/development teams.
Has the amount of venture capital money flowing into health tech changed the dynamics significantly?
The increased capital has helped, but with additional capital comes increased pressure to grow quickly. It’s a balancing act. To retain a lead in the market and consistently innovate, you need great talent and an infrastructure that scales over time and doesn’t remain linear. Market penetration and relevance are the keys to allowing your top line to increase while giving you time to scale and manage expense. We’ve been fortunate to disrupt a traditional market in risk adjustment so our core business is growing well; since 2016, we’ve grown by 600 percent. That’s allowed us to expand our development and marketing efforts into many new adjacencies which supports accelerated growth while expanding markets.
What trends are you seeing in terms of the time elapsed between advertising for a job in health tech and filling it?
Our average days to hire has increased over the last year and based on the comments above, we don’t see that changing anytime soon, so we are always looking to build our bench. We try to be opportunistic; if we find someone outside of a current tech search, we will hire to support overflow.
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