Chief Information Officers (CIOs) responsibilities have increased dramatically since the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (the HITECH Act) passed in February of 2009, and their compensation is not keeping up finds a survey of more than 200 healthcare executives conducted by search firm SSi-SEARCH.

It is a safe assumption that if you asked 200 plus people in any profession if they were compensated enough for their level of responsibility and hard work, you would get a fairly high percentage that would say no. But the CIOs may have a point.

SSi-SEARCH also asked the executives about salary increases since the HITECH act was passed four years ago. The majority (more than 50 percent) reported having received either no increase in base pay or an increase of 10 percent or less. This is supported by results from a 2013 survey of members of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), which found that nearly half of its members that responded to a survey had received less than a 3 percent raise on their base salary in 2012.

The major change to the job of CIO since HITECH was passed has been an increase in complexity and an expansion of the scope of the work, the survey respondents reported. An increase in regulatory requirements was the number one reason behind this change, and 44 percent of the survey respondents said that demand on their performance has increased between 25 percent and 50 percent in the last four year.

Currently, the median salary of the CIOs who responded to the survey was $286,000, but that could rise in the next few years as the majority of the survey respondents predicted their roles would only continue to increase in complexity and importance within their organizations.

George Reynolds, M.D., vice president and chief medical informatics officer and CIO at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, was one of the executives who responded to the survey. “Within the next 5 years, the line separating clinical analytics and business intelligence will be blown away,” he predicted. “In a value-based healthcare marketplace, the ability to understand your patient population’s clinical data and the relationship between that data and financial performance is not optional.”

The survey respondents' biggest frustrations included a scarcity of resources and not being brought in early enough in projects to help shape strategy in ways that would maximize the usefulness of health IT efficiencies.

Read the white paper here.