Today, almost every business is in the health care business

Over the past year, America’s health care system has faced a once-in-a-century challenge. 

With limited resources, health care providers had to find a way to screen, treat and then vaccinate large swaths of the population against a highly contagious, deadly virus. And they had to pull off this feat while making sure people received care for all the other conditions that ail them.

It’s the kind of a challenge made for a company like Amazon. If there’s one thing the Seattle-based tech giant is known for, it’s efficiency.

Amazon had been mulling a health care play for years, well before most people had ever heard the word “coronavirus.” But suddenly, there was a newfound urgency around delivering health care that was fast, convenient — and virtual. The tech giant is now building out its Amazon Care business, which aims to provide on-demand health care services to its own workforce and other U.S. employers. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has reordered the U.S. economy, and put health care in an even more prominent position. And while most firms aren’t creating entire new business units like Amazon, a sizable number of non-health care companies are jumping into the space and hiring for health care roles. Much of this has been spurred by the need to protect their employees, customers and clients. 

LinkedIn’s 2021 Top Companies offer a window into this shift. These employers offer some of the best opportunities for people to grow and future-proof their careers, according to LinkedIn data. And there’s perhaps no more compelling question these days than how we can survive the current health crisis, and prevent the next one.

Amazon — No. 1 on this year’s list —began piloting Amazon Care in 2019, and its momentum grew last year. The service connects people with doctors and nurses through an app. Patients can also get lab tests and exams in their homes, or have prescriptions delivered to their doors.

Fresh demand, within and beyond legacy health care

Health care companies, to be sure, are well represented on this year’s list — ranging from hospitals and insurers to drug makers and pharmacy chains. The demand for health care skills is urgent, particularly for clinical positions like nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians and mental health specialists. 

Yet even companies outside the industry have health care top of mind. The pandemic has created demand for people with other skill sets who want to solve health care problems, including engineers to build telehealth portals and data scientists to help hospitals predict their staffing needs.

Federal and state governments are relying on public health experts to guide them on decisions like when and how to reopen schools, said John Danaher, global president, clinical solutions, at Elsevier. And private employers have the same questions about how to safely bring workers back into offices. 

Many employers are summoning the skills they have in-house to address health care needs. Deloitte, no. 7 on the Top Companies list, has created two pandemic-related task forces, one focused on how to keep people safe and the other on how to bring employees back to the office. Both teams rely on internal talent and include epidemiologists, psychiatrists and other physicians. At IBM (no. 6), research manager Elli Androulaki shifted from using blockchain technology for banking products to using it to create a digital health pass for vaccine verification (which became the basis for New York’s Excelsior Pass). 

Not enough nurses to go around

In some ways, 2020 was the year of the health care professional. Health care jobs featured prominently on LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise list earlier this year, particularly for support staff, nurses and mental health specialists. 

At Kaiser, one of the largest health care providers in the country (and no. 23 on the Top Companies list), demand for intensive care unit nurses increased by more than three-fold, and the need for other nursing positions more than doubled, according to LinkedIn data. HCA Healthcare (no. 34), the largest for-profit hospital operator, also saw a surge in demand for directors of emergency services, nursing managers and physician assistants. And insurer UnitedHealth Group (no. 11) ramped up its search for nurses as well as care coordinators, who help its beneficiaries navigate their health care options. 

At the same time, it has certainly not been all growth, all the time in health care. Last spring, when states first began enacting stay-at-home orders, health care providers began to cancel non-urgent and elective procedures. Dental offices shuttered, and primary care clinics furloughed staff.

To respond to the pandemic, some larger health systems, like Kaiser, were able to move clinicians from non-acute roles to acute care. But for smaller, standalone hospitals, there is no clear system to transfer workers from, say, urban to rural hospitals, and those roles were filled mostly by volunteers, according to Bianca Frogner, director of the University of Washington’s Center for Health Workforce Studies. (Kaiser declined to comment.) Float and travel nurses ended up filling much of the excess demand. 

“I had a huge issue hiring and retaining nurses,” said Chris Creger, who had been serving as chief restructuring officer of a struggling New Jersey-based hospital group. That meant an extra $20,000 per week for each staffing nurse, with funds coming from the CARES Act.

“While I don’t think those levels are sustainable, I think that’s going to foster some additional interest [in the profession],” he said. “Now more than ever, I think health care is considered a recession-proof career.”

Expanding what health care does, where it’s done and who does it

While case counts may be declining in many states, health care now has a new challenge. And that’s to vaccinate as many people as possible, and to do so before newer, more infectious variants create another surge. 

Pharmacies like CVS Health (no. 15) are rapidly hiring pharmacists, nurses and technicians; CVS has been adding as many as 65,000 clinicians since March 2020, according to news reports. Its vaccination programs are running in stores as well as long-term care facilities and onsite clinics for employers. While pharmacists could already provide vaccines in all 50 states, CVS sees their role evolving one step further, into health promotion and education.

“The pharmacy is a trusted source of information, as is the pharmacist,” said Kirsten Anderson, clinical lead for infectious disease at CVS Health, during a March episode of LinkedIn News Live. “I think it’s so important because the pharmacist is part of the community.”

The same was true at Walmart (no. 9), where LinkedIn data found more than a 150% increase in demand for pharmacists. “We offered sign-on bonuses and premium pay to hire additional talented pharmacists and pharmacy techs, with referral bonuses for our existing pharmacy associates,” said Julie Murphy, Walmart’s chief people officer. “These new hires have helped us keep up with the incredible demand for COVID-19 testing and now to help administer the COVID-19 vaccine to customers in our stores across the country.”

Walmart is offering the vaccine in 49 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. The effort is separate from its ambitions to create “health care supercenters” under the Walmart Health brand (though high-profile departures have slowed the rollout.)

Demand is also expected to remain strong for mental health professionals, who were highly sought out as the pandemic upended lives and livelihoods and forced people into social isolation. Both Kaiser and HCA rapidly increased their number of mental health specialists, a position that saw twice as much demand as the previous year. 

Home health is another area where experts expect a sharp uptick in demand. Families began to resist sending their loved ones to nursing homes as infections tore through those facilities; residents accounted for about 40% of all COVID-19 deaths as of last month. 

But home health “is a very vulnerable workforce,” University of Washington’s Frogner pointed out. In addition to low wages, many home health workers lacked personal protective equipment during the pandemic and were forced to grapple with limited transportation and child care options. 

Many health systems, including Kaiser, have stepped up home care. And as home health workers care for sicker and more complicated patients, the demand for more highly skilled professionals could lead to increased pay.

“With higher acuity, you can command higher wages,” said Candace Wallace, a vice president at health care training firm Relias. “You’re seeing people transition from different care settings into home health.”

The home health industry is bringing in people who lost their jobs in other fields. Among the industries with transferable skills? Food service and hospitality, according to reports like this one from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. 

What will all this demand add up to? Potential talent wars. And health care organizations may soon find themselves in competition with the likes of new entrants. Amazon Care is actively hiring nurses and doctors in addition to traditional tech roles like software engineers and product managers. And this year, it plans to launch its chat-with-a-nurse virtual service as well as in-person care.

“‘Learn and be curious’ is one of our Amazon leadership principles,” said Kristen Helton, who heads Amazon Care. “What we’re doing is training the next generation of health care.”