During a telephone press conference on Tuesday morning, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal announced that HHS has allocated $80 million in grants to help address an estimated shortage of 50,000 health IT workers, Modern Healthcare reports (Conn, Modern Healthcare, 11/24).
The funding includes $70 million to create community college health IT training programs and $10 million to develop educational materials to support those programs, Blumenthal said.
According to Blumenthal, the grants will establish six-month, intensive, non-degree training programs aimed at individuals with some background in health care or IT. Participating community colleges will coordinate their efforts through five regional consortia (Manos, Healthcare IT News, 11/24). The new programs are expected to train 10,000 health IT workers annually (Modern Healthcare, 11/24).
The funding earmarked for health IT training was authorized by the federal stimulus package.
Blumenthal said more details on the training programs will be released in the next several weeks (Healthcare IT News, 11/24).