HIT programs' first grads ready to help your practice

Need help adopting electronic health records (EHRs) and achieving meaningful use? You can look to the 3,000 people who will be the first graduates of the Community College Consortia to Educate Health Information Technology (HIT) Professionals by the end of the summer. More than 2,200 of these graduates were expected to complete their training in April.

The students are part of a broader workforce development program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for HIT that also includes university-based training, HIT competency examinations, and the development of an HIT curriculum for use in institutions of higher education. The Community College Consortia graduates represent a portion of the initial HIT workforce that will be trained through the workforce development program this year.

The programs are designed for professionals with an IT or healthcare background and focus on training students for the following professional roles:

• practice workflow and information management redesign specialists,
• clinician/practitioner consultants,
• implementation support specialists,
• implementation managers,
• technical/software support, and
• trainers.

“Training the professionals to support the growing HIT industry is a critical step toward ensuring that healthcare providers large and small are successful in their adoption and meaningful use of HIT,” says Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, national coordinator for HIT. “The workforce development programs represent a comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of the entire healthcare industry. The programs are designed to deliver highly qualified professionals who are proficient in every level of the healthcare delivery system.”

Members of this new workforce will fill a need for the HIT professionals necessary to help you, other healthcare providers, and hospitals nationwide improve the overall health of their patients through using HIT. These new professionals also will have been trained to work with EHR vendors to implement EHR systems in provider and hospital settings.