10 Hottest Healthcare IT Developer and Programming Skills

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the healthcare industry is leading the market in jobs creation. This shouldn’t be surprising when you consider all that’s going on within healthcare and the technology needed to support it. So what type of programming and developer skills are healthcare employers looking for?

CIO.com worked with Indeed.com, a job aggregation website that reports 1.5 billion job searches per month, to find out the where the jobs are, who’s looking to hire and what developer and programming skills are hot within this growing job market.

*Salary information is not HIT specific. It is the industry average.

Let’s begin with where the most healthcare IT jobs are within the U.S. According to Indeed’s data, Boston; Washington, D.C.; and New York City top the list of cities with the most HIT developer jobs.

There are a number of factors to consider if you’re going to a new city for a job. For example, salary, the cost of living, traffic and commuting conditions all play an integral part of the decision-making process when considering changing locations.

The HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, is the premier building block of the Web, and is used for the creation of Web pages, and with the advent of the latest version, HTML5, Web applications. A standard Web browser, whether it’s Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera or the mobile Dolphin browser, reads HTML-based documents and converts them into visible or audible Web pages by reading the HTML tags to interpret and display the contents of the page. By creating apps using HTML5, healthcare workers are able to access the same data regardless of the Internet-connected device they are using.

The C# programming language is a multi-paradigm language that involves imperative, generic, declarative, procedural, functional, class-based, object-oriented and component-oriented programming disciplines that provide developers with the functionality needed to create sophisticated applications for the healthcare industry, including Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Systems, Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS, LIS), EMR Alerting Systems and more.

Created by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative, C# was meant to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language, but has proven itself to be much more.

Unlike the other technologies covered here, ASP.NET is a server-side Web application framework that was designed by Microsoft in 2002 to enable developers to create dynamic websites, Web applications and Web services. It was created as the successor to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) technology, and was built on the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which allowed programmers to code ASP.NET using any supported .NET language.

ASP.NET is used within the healthcare industry for the creation and implementation of Web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application suites, electronic payment processing systems, healthcare data management systems and more.

C is the oldest programming language covered in this slideshow. It was developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. It has facilities for structured programming and allows lexical variable scope and recursion, and was designed with a static type system to provide unintended operations. It’s a general purpose programming language that provides constructs that are able to efficiently map to normal machine instructions and is therefore often used in legacy applications that were previously developed using assembly language, especially system software such as that of the Unix operating system. Many healthcare institutions still rely on computers that are running Unix, and, for that reason, C programming continues to be a vital skill within the industry.