Opportunity Corridor

Part of the main Cleveland Clinic campus on the newly widened East 105th Street, just south of Cedar Avenue.

(Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A reorganization affecting Cleveland Clinic's Information Technology division will not lead to mass layoffs among the hospital system's IT employees, according to a Clinic spokeswoman.

"It is completely not true that there are going to be massive layoffs," Janice Guhl Hammer, senior director of media and public relations, said Wednesday.

In late December, the Clinic and IBM announced a five-year agreement aimed at expanding the Clinic's IT capabilities in its clinical and administrative operations. This includes improving efficiencies in the analysis of data from electronic health records, or EHR, and information from administrative claims.

After the agreement was announced, rumors of mass layoffs in the Clinic's IT division began circulating. Such rumors even appeared this week in the comment section of an online Plain Dealer story about fallout from a Clinic doctor implying in a column that there was a link between vaccinations and autism.

Guhl Hammer said employees in the IT Division were told this week that a small number of layoffs could potentially result from the Clinic's agreement with IBM. However, it would be another six months before it would be known what positions would be eliminated. She said the IT division had about 1,500 employees. Only about 10 percent of these workers could potentially be impacted by the Clinic revamping some of its IT operations. "Impacted" doesn't necessarily mean lay offs, Guhl Hammer said. She said Clinic officials gave IT employees some scenarios about what could occur with positions six months from now.

"The scenarios are that there might be an opportunity in which they might be employed by IBM or stay in positions at the Cleveland Clinic," Guhl Hammer said. "What we cannot say for sure is that there will be no positions eliminated. That is something that we will not know for sure until we make it through the next six months of this transition."

In fact, she said the agreement with IBM could lead to more IT jobs being created.

"Over the course of six months there is a lot that could change as well," Guhl Hammer said. "We could actually advance opportunities for our current IT division. We didn't want to tell them (employees) that no positions would be eliminated. If they are, it is going to be a very small number of positions."

Plain Dealer Reporter Brie Zeltner contributed to this report.