Health IT is Coming Soon to a Class Near You
The HITECH Act is about more than putting computers on the desks of physicians nationwide. It’s about using health information technology (IT) to improve the safety, quality, and effectiveness of our health care system. That takes more than computers. It takes qualified, trained people who are willing to work together toward that goal.
In fact, one of the barriers to the widespread adoption of health IT has been a shortage of qualified workers who can help the nation’s health care providers make the transition. The current push for greater adoption of health IT will create even more jobs that need to be filled by qualified workers.
To address the workforce shortage, the HITECH Act authorized the creation of a program to assist in the establishment and/or expansion of programs to train a skilled workforce to facilitate the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs). The Community College Consortia to Educate Health Information Professionals is designed to train “health IT practitioners” who can meet the needs of hospitals and physicians as they move to an electronic health care system. EHR vendors and public health facilities will also have jobs that these professionals can fill.
Five community college consortia were funded to implement the training programs. The goal of the programs is to train 10,500 people a year in six workforce roles. The five consortia include 84 community colleges. Each regional consortium is led by a lead community college that is responsible for the coordination of the program in the region.
The community colleges will offer six-month non-degree programs for people already involved in the health care or information technology fields so they can quickly learn the skills necessary to ensure the rapid and effective adoption of health IT. Courses will be available both at the colleges and through distance learning. Each student will receive an institutional certificate or equivalent for successfully completing the program. In some cases, financial assistance may be available to enable students to take advantage of this opportunity. In six months or less, qualified applicants can be ready for jobs in the growing area of health IT. The colleges will help students who complete the program find jobs in their new fields.
I’m pleased to announce that, just in time for the coming school year, the curricula are developed, and community colleges across the country are staffing up and recruiting students for the first wave of classes. We expect classes to start by September 30 in most of the colleges. That means the time to apply is now.
The six workforce roles for which students can train are:
- Practice workflow and information management redesign specialists: The goal of health IT is to improve processes, not just computerize them. An essential part of the transition will be to assess workflows in a practice, suggest changes to increase the quality and efficiency of care and facilitate reporting, and work with providers to implement these changes. These jobs are well-suited for people with experience in practice management or IT in a clinical setting.
- Clinician/practitioner consultants: The colleges will offer programs for licensed health professionals so that they can apply their specialized clinical knowledge to selecting hardware/software, working with vendors, and ensuring that clinical goals are met.
- Implementation support specialists: Specialists will be needed to install and test health IT systems in clinical settings to ensure that the systems are easy and effective to use. The Community College Consortia will provide training for those who have IT or information management experience but not necessarily in the health care arena.
- Implementation managers: Those who have administrative or managerial experience in health or IT environments may seek additional training to oversee and manage the transition to health IT for providers.
- Technical/software support: Providers will need ongoing support to diagnose IT problems, develop solutions, and keep systems running smoothly and securely. Those with IT or information management experience may want to train for these positions.
- Trainers: The need for skilled trainers will be ongoing. Practice staff will have to be trained on new systems and upgrades. And new staff will have to be trained as they come onboard. IT specialists with training experience can receive instruction in the design and delivery of training programs.
We at ONC are excited about the potential of the Community College Consortia – for the students who will train for promising new careers, for the health care providers who will have qualified staff to guide them through the transition to health IT, and for all the patients who stand to benefit from the increased quality, safety and effectiveness of care made possible by digital information technology.
To learn more, contact the consortium leader for your geographical area.
This is great news! The Metro Chicago Health Information Exchange (HIE), when hopefully launched early next year, will allow for the seamless transmission of a patient’s health information, no matter who provided the care – a hospital, physician(s), pharmacy, skilled nursing facility, etc or what type of computer system, hardware and software each has implemented.
Check out our blog as we discuss HIE’s: http://www.supportourhospitals.com/blog/?p=540
I am surprized that ONC/HHS did not foresee the impact that HITECH would have on medical transcriptionists and the small business sector that they populate. The impact has been huge, with many small businesses forced to downsize as healthcare providers implement voice-recognition software components incorporated into the EHR platform. I suggest that HHS had a responsibility to first provide workforce development grants to the small business MTs adversely impacted by HITECH. Instead, they have chosen to bolster the community college sector, expecting affected MTs to finance their own workforce retraining (especially difficult when self employed and laid off, since you do not qualify for Unemployment Insurance benefits). This Stimulus initiative has cut our revenues by at least 75% in the last 6 months. Another “green job” lost (we tele-network). Discouraged. . . .
As a medical transcriptionist for over 30 years, I sincerely feared that voice recognition would ultimately over my job; however, the reality is that it hasn’t. Off-shore outsourcing did! We were blind-sited by this fact, never saw it coming. The entire time technology emerged, we were being told about voice recognition.
The fact is that voice recognition has still not reached the pinnacle that all have stated it would, it still requires extreme editing by the transcriptionist; however, the facilities are being sold on the fact that it will increase turn-around time and reduce expense.
The turn-around time remains the same, as many physicians do not utilize the system as required for it to reduce turnaround time, which requires them to state to the system when to insert a “period”, “comma”, or “paragraph”. Why won’t they do it? The physician does not have the time; this has increased the amount of time the physician spends doing something we all know they loathe to do in the first place. As a result, the transcriptionist, now editor, is unjumbling a big mess of text which has no reason or rhyme.
The reduction in expense is glorified because the vendors sold the premise to the facilities indicating the transcriptionists are no longer transcribing, they are editing. What a joke! The transcriptionist still has to listen to each and every word, regardless of whether we have to enter a keystroke or not; which in effect we enter many more steps to make the jumbled mess make sense.
Voice recognition is not there yet even though it’s being sold that way. But out-sourcing is far worse, and the quality of out-sourcing looks that that of an report that was generated by voice recognition that has not been edited by the transcriptionist.
One of the things that frustrates me, and maybe I am mis-informed is that there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on targeting the unemployed sector with this program. What i mean is there is all this money earmarked from the stimulus package being awarded to health care providers who move forward and buy into the electronic health records agenda. Now, in addition the HITECH act will be funneling in an entire class of prospects to build up the pool of IT professionals that will be needed to implement the actual applications and train staff as well as provide on going technical support as the providers who have moved into the all digital world will certainly need some hand holding!
To me this is such a no brainer and it just screams that someone has really dropped the ball. What better way to boost the economy, add some desperately needed jobs, put a damper on the rising unemployment statistics, AND shore up the needed IT force needed to accomplish this enormous task. Why are there not incentives or programs being put in place for unemployed technical workers to be able to continue receiving benefits while training for this certification? Doe this make sense to anyone else? If there is some kind of program that is being considered I sure can’t find a shred of information about it, because I would be first in line!
I agree, however it seems that the constraints on the unemployed may be state mandated. I suggest that you contact your state rep and get additional logic associated with the law as it was likely created to address a multiplicity of factors. I, however, totally agree that there should be legislation on the state level that removes any constraint to retraining while receiving unemployment benefits. To reiterate, any constraint re: unemployment is state mandated and the US Constitution places certain responsibilities with the states. Therefore the federal government cannot dictate to the states that which the US Constitution reserves for the states. Bottom line: Work with your state legislature to make a law specifically for the application that you seek. I would encourage you to write to your state governor and present a business case and a benefit analysis.
What has been most frustrating for me as a displaced worker is that I have been enrolled in school for over 1 year working towards obtaining certification as an enrolled student in a HIM course at the local community college that I was not given the chance to apply for the scholarship. I have a current GPA of 3.0 and 20 years experience in this field but never achieved certification because I was a single parent providing for my household.
I now have missed the chance for scholarship because the information was not communicated to all enrolled students interested in a HIM degree. I am currently receiving unemployment benefits which will end in November and have another semester left before I can qualify for testing as a certified coder. Why can’t programs like this develop internship programs through workforce development or other qualifying factors like years of experience? Why allow the added stress of homelessness to someone in search of on the job training programs which can be considered as paid internship programs? Internship programs exist in the VA already and could be considered as another way to create jobs while providing adequate training and the added benefit would be the reduction in the unemployment rates across the states. Just my thoughts on how this program could be used to benefit the needs of many. Displaced workers, students and the government; should be a win for all.
This is definitely great news! I’ve been maintaining my company’s systems for about 7 years now without getting certified, which makes it hard to move up. I was thinking about changing fields because of that. But 6 months of class time is doable instead of 4 months crammed into 1 week and cost thousands for each course week.
Healthcare and IT are undoubtedly connected and will be even more so in the future. This seems like it will be a great experience for students, not to mention useful for their careers too. Hopefully this Health IT program will be a success and become much more popular in the future. I would think that would be a likely scenario.
I find this to very encouraging. Both the public and private sector need to tap into the talent to be found in Community Colleges. By training students we are giving them an opportunity to step into a position of productivity and we are providing a qualified work force that is sorely lacking in so many sectors today. I am curious to learn what criteria was used to select the Community Colleges in this program.
The curriculum being used to provide online training in my area has significant problems, including factually incorrect information, errors and incomplete files in presentations, inconsistent audio, and most disturbing, quiz and test questions that are categorically wrong. What makes this worse is that students are sometimes prohibited from knowing what questions they got wrong on their tests. When the “correct” answer to a question directly contradicts what is stated in the curriculum, how can the students possibly trust that their grades are fair?
I realize this is a new program, but the mechanism for students to provide direct feedback on specific errors in the curriculum seems to be completely missing.
Thanks for the feedback. ONC and the CD grantees are aware of these issues, which have been addressed in version 2.0 coming out in a few weeks. Please work with your instructor to submit your concerns to the National Training and Dissemination Center (NTDC).