Elaine Norris says it's getting harder to convince young, technology-oriented people to forgo a career fixing a computer virus in favor of a career testing for a real virus.

"I think a great deal is salary," said Norris, a medical technologist in the toxicology department at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. "Young people looking at entering the workforce today see all the high-tech possibilities, and those salaries are very good. Health care just can't really, across the board, compete with those types of salaries."

Hospitals are being confronted with vacancy rates that Baylor says are above 10 percent for medical technologists--the staff who perform blood and tissue tests for illness or disease--and many say the more traditional high-tech companies are the main culprit.

Medical technologists usually work with sophisticated, diagnostic computer equipment with names like SE-9500, a cell analysis computer workstation, and other computer equipment such as spectrophotometers, which measure the level of radiation given off by bodily fluids and tissues.

The level of sophistication in the computer equipment medical technologists use is advancing so rapidly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted, that increased automation could relieve some of the worker shortages.

"I think the boom in the technology sector of the economy over the last five years has taken people who fundamentally might have been interested in this as a profession, because they're kind of technology-oriented people," said Dr. Pete Dysart, chief of the department of pathology at Baylor. "I think it really just changed the slope of the decline of people entering the profession."

Dysart said that the shortage has its roots in the disappearance of schools offering medical technology degrees.

"We . . . have not seen the severe shortage that we're looking at now," said Pete Smith, administrative director of the department of pathology at Baylor. "It's been over a period of time. The schools closed down in the late '80s and early '90s, and so these folks have just sort of not been replaced in the workforce."

Jody Talbert, vice president of marketing for the allied health division at health care recruiting firm Martin Fletcher & Associates in Irving, Texas, said that the American Society of Clinical Pathologists is certifying about 2,400 medical technology students a year, while the demand is closer to 5,000.

"[Hospitals] have a hard time getting them interested in the hospital jobs, because the hospital jobs are paying anywhere from, on the low end, $13 an hour and, on the high end, $19.50," he said. "You can make a lot more money in the other high-tech fields."

Dysart said that, in addition to pay, technically inclined workers are also more apt to choose to work in an industry where there are opportunities for advancement.

"If you're a medical tech, we don't typically have these very large business structures overlying a department or laboratory," he said. "We're pretty flat in that regard, in terms of the organizational structure. So as far as a career path goes, you enter the field of medical technology, you may be able to advance to a leadership role over that section of the department, but compared to other industries, the upward mobility for somebody with those kinds of skills looks pretty small on a relative scale."

Some facilities have been able to sidestep the shortage of medical technologists, but not without a little good luck.

"Actually, we have been pretty fortunate that we have not had that type of position open for quite a while," said Priscilla Ortega, director of human resources at Garland Community Hospital in Garland, Texas. "When we did have that position open, we were fortunate once again to be able to have them transfer from a sister facility."

Ortega said her hospital actually knew when the two people were resigning last summer and was able to arrange their transfer before they ever hit the job market.

Most haven't been so lucky.

"I've only been downtown at the hospital for a year," said Baylor's Norris, "and in that year's time, every shift--days, evenings and nights--all of those shifts have openings, and they have not yet been able to fill all of those openings."

Norris added that since most hospitals can't compete with Microsoft, Dell and Texas Instruments when it comes to salaries, they have to offer something else.

"I think oftentimes our society views a career more as what I can gain from it monetarily, instead of looking at a career and not only saying, `What can I gain,' but `What can I offer to this career in terms of helping our society better itself?'" she said.

"I think that's something that you just have to really encourage people to look at. We're not at the totally low end of the scale, but we're not up there able to compete with the high-tech type of jobs."