St. Louis-based Sisters of Mercy Health System has laid off 70 employees, including 11 at St. John's Health System in Springfield.
The positions were all in Mercy's information technology division and were scattered across the entire system, which has facilities in seven states, according to Mercy spokesman Chris Berra. The cuts represent about 10 percent of the Mercy's total IT work force.
The layoffs are part of a restructuring effort to change the company's IT abilities to better meet the needs of a highly technical industry, Berra said. While some positions were eliminated, other workers are being moved to revised positions - though Berra could not yet say how many - and new IT positions are being created in some specialty areas.
"The things that consumers want from health care, and the things that allow us to deliver health care more safely with more quality and service, all involve components of IT," Berra said. "It requires these types of specialties to basically build the infrastructure behind the scenes that makes this work."
So far, areas the system has tabbed for new positions include application development, database management and interfacing, according to Berra. Employees in the IT division were evaluated on whether they had the right skill sets for the new specialty areas.
"To the greatest extent, we aimed to move people into new roles," Berra said.
The system has no plans for additional layoffs at this time.
Reader Comments
Posted: Saturday, June 13, 2009
Article comment by:
Robert Beckett
Your "message" is nearly incoherent--at least to one unacquainted with IT jargon. It is unclear whether 11 persons have been terminated from the St. John's system, from the Springfield hospital, or whether some smaller number of persons has been fired and some smaller number has been shifted to newly labeled jobs. Your comment, thus, is consistent with your billing--it means nothing except to those who already know. But such people would not bother to read your comment. Hence its only apparent purpose is to obfuscate, appearing to explain what it fails to explain.
