Health Informatics gets a Federal Boost

The nation's health information technology coordinator announced Tuesday that his office will provide $80 million in grants to help in training skilled health information technicians who can work with hospitals, doctors and other providers in adopting health information technology.

David Blumenthal, the Department of Health and Human Services' national coordinator for health IT, said $70 million of the funding would go to about 70 community colleges, grouped in five regions around the country, to provide non-degree training in health IT, which could be completed in six months, and $10 million will go toward developing educational materials to be used by the colleges and others.

"Ensuring the adoption of electronic health records, information exchange among health care providers and public health authorities, and redesign of workflows within health care settings all depend on having a qualified pool of workers," Blumenthal said in a statement.

This training program has all the earmarks of a temporary, quick-fix approach to the health informatics challenges found at the local level. Hopefully this administration will follow up with a program that underwrites database administrator degrees for the health care industries, so that there can be some professional competency at the next step: instituting a national health care database that will apply digital technology to an area of health care that is still in the manila folder stage of development.

Blumenthal said there needs to be an increase in skilled health IT workers to help doctors and other health professionals become "meaningful users" of health IT. He said the nation currently is short about 50,000 workers in this sector. The good news for people in search of a new career is that despite these immediate opportunities there is a long way to go before the health care database is a reality; implementing it will require network analysts and a variety of technology and IT professionals with degrees at every level.

Blumenthal's deputy, Charles Friedman, said he expects the initiative will result in about 10,000 newly trained healthcare IT professionals each year. If that prediction becomes fact it will make health informatics among the fastest growing job sectors in the nation's fastest growing industry. At the moment, the Government Health Information Technology program (GHIT) is accepting grant applications from schools. This is the first educational component for the nationwide collaboration that the government is creating to implement a state of the art health informatics system.