ATE Grants Improve Entry to Health IT Careers

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Bellevue College’s Life Science Informatics Center meshed an Advanced Technological Education project grant with two large federal grants to create an industry-recognized credential, preparatory curriculum, and set of career pathways for people who want to become health information technology (IT) technicians.

The three grants—totaling nearly $20 million since 2010—build on the expertise that the college gained by operating the National Workforce Center in Emerging Technologies, which was funded by the National Science Foundation from 1995 to 2002 as a national ATE center.

“All of our efforts were informed by that center. It was a huge stimulus to our college and for our learners,” said Patricia Dombrowski, director of the Life Science Informatics Center at the Washington state college. “It’s been almost astounding how all these pieces have fit together,” she added.

Health-care providers’ demand for IT technicians is high and is expected to remain strong in the future due to federal government incentives for hospitals and physicians to switch from paper to electronic medical records. However, the information technologies used in health care are so new and the variety of employers so great that navigating this field is difficult even for people who have IT skills from other fields or who are already employed in health care.

As evidence of the unmet demand for health IT skills and documentation of incumbent worker skills, Dombrowski cites the tremendous response to an online course that the college developed for employees at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA had expected a few hundred employees to take the online course on their own time. But by the middle of the first day that VA employees nationally could enroll in the 10-week introduction to health IT course, all 1,000 slots were filled, and another 1,000 people were placed on the waiting list.

ATE Grant Supports Development of CAHIMS Credential

With the ATE project grant that the college received from the NSF in 2010, it developed a course and certification exam for aspiring entry-level IT technicians to gain entry to this promising IT sector, and for those already work in health IT to document their skills.

NSF’s mission does not include the medical sciences, which are the realm of other federal agencies. Bellevue College’s ATE grant, therefore, focused on the IT technicians who work on databases, networks, and the IT infrastructure of health-care providers. It does not involve technicians who use advanced technologies to provide patient care directly.

For the ATE project, Bellevue College personnel developed the Certified Associate in Health Information & Management (CAHIMS) credential with the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the world’s largest IT professional health association. CAHIMS is a stackable, industry-recognized credential that provides a pathway to a HIMSS certification for upper managers (CPHIMS).

The National Training and Education Resource website, will offer the free, online preparatory course for the CAHIMS exam. Applied Measurement Professionals, Inc. administers the CAHIMS exam at its assessment centers nationwide.

Two Other Grants Complement ATE Project

At the same time that Bellevue College was working on its ATE project, it received a $6.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to lead implementation in a 10-state region of IT health curricula developed by the federal government. “It worked out beautifully. One [grant] very much referenced the other. One very much strengthened the other,” Dombrowski explained.

Then in 2012, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) awarded Bellevue College $11.8 million to lead a consortium of nine community colleges in a national effort to help develop a much-needed health IT workforce. The consortium aims to improve the skills of health IT technicians, to welcome military veterans into the sector, and to boost the uptake of the CAHIMS curriculum by community colleges.

As part of the DOL grant, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding to Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative to work with Bellevue faculty on metrics for every aspect of the online CAHIMS preparatory course. This complete “wiring” of the course will provide immediate feedback for students, who can take the course on their own, and analysis for faculty who choose to incorporate the course into their college’s IT curriculum.

Bellevue College is also using the DOL grant to work with HIMSS on an initiative to welcome, assist, support, and help place veterans into health IT employment positions. The HIMSS Heroes Welcome program will complement the federally registered apprenticeship program in health IT that the consortium is developing.

The consortium is also developing and piloting additional IT health certificate courses and offering professional development for allied health faculty and IT faculty. “Both of them are charged with teaching IT in health care, but few have experience within the others’ domain,” Dombrowski said.

Categories:
  • health
  • science
  • technology
From:
    ATE Impacts

Last Edited: August 19th, 2013 at 8:44pm by Madeline Patton

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