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A growing number of Californians are being sent to ambulatory surgery centers for a wide variety of procedures, yet little is known about the care they deliver because reporting is not required.

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CHCF has made a second investment in Asthmapolis, a device that tracks asthma inhaler use and reports data through mobile phones to patients and doctors to better manage the disease.

Special Reports

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Community Colleges, Universities Charge Ahead To Address Health IT Work Force Shortage

The U.S. needs an estimated 50,000 additional health IT professionals to help hospitals and physicians become meaningful users of electronic health records.

Under the 2009 economic stimulus package, health care providers who demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHRs can qualify for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments.

Last year, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT doled out $84 million in grants to universities and community colleges to train more students in health IT. Earlier this year, ONC announced another $80 million available for community colleges and other health IT work force development programs.

In an iHealthBeat Special Report by Mina Kim, experts weighed in on the progress of federal efforts to boost the country's health IT work force. The Special Report includes comments from:

  • David Falkenstein, project director for federally funded grants at Northern Virginia Community College;
  • William Hersh, professor and chair of Oregon Health and Science University's Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology;
  • George Hickman, executive vice president and CIO of Albany Medical Center; and
  • Thomas Shlala, health IT grant program coordinator for Atlanta Technical College (Kim, iHealthBeat, 3/30).

The complete transcript of this Special Report is available as a PDF.

Running Time: 6:18

Reader Comments:
  • 5
  • 04/05/2011
  • randy berger

The OHSU graduate certificate program under the leadership of Bill Hersh is amazing. I am half way through it.
The next challenge is linking the newly trained people with the jobs that need to get done.

  • 4
  • 03/31/2011
  • Patti Abbott

Adding an important Addendum:

The "VistA for Education" that will go Open Source in June does require InterSystems Cache which is free to all academic institutions.

If you are not an academic institution - then you may incur a cost for the Cache database software.

Also important to point out is that getting new patient data into VistA is NOT trivial. Even developing the VistA For Education required that we contract assistance for data input. We used BlueNovo (URL below).

  • 3
  • 03/31/2011
  • Patti Abbott

The EHR educational "package" developed for release to the Community Colleges as part of the HITECH/ONC/ARRA funds is the Veterans Affairs VitsA CPRS. VistA is available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)- which has spawned grwoth of systems like VxVista, World Vista, and Medsphere that built on top of FOIA VistA.

The system developed for the Community College workforce programs is FOIA VistA, with no commercial overlay, which means it is free for use now by the Community Colleges. It will go "Open Source" in June of 2011 - which means anyone can request it, download it via a server, install and run. Along with the VistA software program comes full access to "Roll and Scroll" the back-end to Fileman which enables the development of reminders and alerts and allows knowledgeable folks to further populate the patient database.

Also to be released are the full educational modules that have VistA & Roll and Scroll Activities built within (lectures, powerpoints, etc.)

  • 2
  • 03/31/2011
  • Lee Hauser

My understanding is that these federally-funded programs cannot "push" any particular commercial EMR software package. I just graduated from the Bellevue College (Washington) Healthcare IT program, and they are just beginning to be able to make available the educational version of the VA's VistA EMR software and an educational EMR product from VariPoint. Fortunately they are making these available to recent graduates as well. The VistA download has a populated database and the VariPoint portal has exercises for students.

  • 1
  • 03/30/2011
  • Thomas McMcennamin

A significant issue facing academic institutions that will train the future HIT workforce is a lack of access to a high quality and highly utilized EHR for training purposes. Most EHR vendors either do not provide academic licenses or do so at a prohibitive cost. Practice Fusion EHR supports a free academic program that enables any university or college access to the fastest growing ambulatory EHR on the market. By accessing Practice Fusion as a learning tool, the future HIT workforce is well-prepared to support the rapidly growing HIT needs of the American health care system.



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