Stop asking who to hire — start by naming the gap you are trying to close
By Chris Beckage, Procom Technology Solutions
BOTTOM LINE
Each of those is a different problem. Each has a different right answer. The mistake is picking before you’ve named the gap.
The question that comes too early
It usually starts the same way. A modernization initiative needs to move. A security program needs to mature. A new integration needs to happen. And the first question a healthcare technology leader asks isn’t “what does this actually require” — it’s “who do we need to hire.”
That instinct makes sense. Hiring is a familiar lever. It’s the tool most organizations reach for first, because it’s the one everyone already knows how to pull. But it’s also the wrong question to start with, and answering it too early tends to cost more time than it saves.
Three different gaps, three different answers
The better question is one most organizations skip: what kind of gap is this, actually? Is it a specific skill the team doesn’t have? A broader capacity problem, where the team has the right skills but not enough hands? Or a bounded piece of work that needs to be assessed, planned, and delivered?
Each of those is a different problem. Each has a different right answer. And none of them is reliably solved by defaulting to job posting.
We think about this as a continuum, not a single choice. Sometimes the right move is a specialist — one person with a specific skill, added to a team that’s already running the initiative. Sometimes it’s a small team of complementary specialists, working alongside the people already there. And sometimes the work is well-defined enough to scope and deliver its own project: assess what’s happening, plan the approach, execute it, and hand it back.
The mistake isn’t picking the wrong one of these. The mistake is picking before you’ve named the gap.
What naming the gap looked like on a 15-year-old platform
This shows clearly in a healthcare modernization engagement involving a regional healthcare organization that needed to move a 15-year-old custom platform to Azure. The platform carried real technical debt and real security exposure — the kind of thing that shows up on every risk register and stays there for years because nobody has a clean way to address it without disrupting what it supports.
In this case, the workflows running on that platform couldn’t go offline. Quoting, plan comparison, document generation — all of it had to keep working while the underlying system changed underneath it.
The instinct in a situation like that is often to add headcount and hope the team figures it out alongside everything else they’re already doing. What happened was different: an assessment first, to understand exactly what was running and what depended on it, followed by a migration and stabilization sequenced specifically to protect those live workflows. The work was completed and the platform fully stabilized in 90 days, with the business-critical workflows operational throughout.
None of that started with a hiring decision. It started with a question about what the actual work was.
Security programs show the same pattern
The stakes of getting this right are rising, not falling. As of June 2026, 772 large healthcare data breaches for 2025 were listed on HHS OCR’s breach portal, according to HIPAA Journal’s analysis of the portal data. That would put 2025 above the prior portal-report high of 746 in 2023. (Source: HIPAA Journal analysis of HHS OCR breach portal data, June 2026.) Portal analysis shows most were tied to hacking or other IT incidents, not lost paperwork. That’s not a reason for alarm. It’s a reason to be precise about where the actual exposure sits, and precise about what kind of work is required to close it.
A security program that needs to mature quickly after a new leader arrives, or after an incident, isn’t usually missing one role. It’s usually missing coordinated capacity across several disciplines at once — architecture, governance, cloud security, third-party risk — brought together deliberately rather than filled one req at a time.
That’s the same pattern, again: naming the actual shape of the gap before deciding how to close it.
Before you open the requisition
None of this is an argument against hiring. Sometimes the right answer really is a specific person with a specific skill, and there’s no substitute for that. But treating every technology gap as a staffing problem — reflexively, before understanding what the gap is — means healthcare organizations end up solving for the tool they know instead of the problem they have.
QUESTIONS TO TAKE BACK TO YOUR TEAM
Before opening the req, ask:
- Is this gap a missing skill, a capacity issue, or a scoped project?
- What outcome needs to be delivered, and by when?
- Is a job posting the right answer, or just the most familiar one?
Next step
Procom Consulting Services works with healthcare technology leaders to work out what kind of gap they are facing, then matches the right approach: a specialist, a team of specialists or a defined project.
To talk through an initiative on your plate, use the form below.
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About the author
Chris Beckage, Vice President, Consulting Services
With over 25 years in the staffing industry, Chris drives Procom’s Consulting Services efforts to expand market opportunities and partnerships across North America.
