Feds To Help Train 50,000 Health IT Workers 212
Lucas123 writes "The US Department of Health and Human Services is spending about $144 million on grant programs at more than 80 colleges and universities to help fill a void of about 50,000 workers for IT jobs in the healthcare industry. The workers are needed to help hospitals, physician practices and other healthcare entities to roll out electronic medical records, which the government is promoting through the use of reimbursement funds for those who implement EMRs and penalties for those who don't. The Health IT courses are set to begin this fall in five regions around the US and are aimed exclusively at workers who have previous IT or healthcare experience."
This is for existing IT field people (Score:5, Informative)
I always hate to RTFA and burst the naysayer bubbles, but "the training programs are aimed at people who already have health care or IT backgrounds -- not workers from other fields who have no previous experience or training in either discipline." As such I don't think it is dilutive in terms of IT worker salaries... they are taking people would would have been in the IT workforce and steering them to healthcare.
This isn't the old "train the janitor to develop complex systems" move from dot-com era. However the article does not seem to address the possibility of recipients of this training going overseas with the expertise.
Re:Windows != IT (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, healthcare in the USA (and many other countries) is *extremely* entrenched in Microsoft products (trust me, I know) and closed source software. The whole "giving out money for EMR's" has been a disaster. Special interest groups have pretty much ensured that all the money will go only to "approved" or "certified" systems, which are all closed-source, commercial packages (and almost all also running on MS-Windows).
And guess what those companies did? They RAISED THEIR PRICES for that software by the same amount of money that is being pumped into handouts to hospitals and physician groups!
Instead of pumping billions of dollars into closed source, single-platform, commercial products that lock in customers, the Fed should have directed that money into open standards, open source, and multi-platform research and coding. You want to talk about savings? Imagine how much the industry could save if there was at least one robust, flexible, open-source, multi-platform EMR? (And no, that isn't OpenVistA). Let EMR companies make their money off custom (but open) additions, installation, training, support, hosting, etc.
Re:yeah, sure is a lack of unemployed IT types (Score:2, Informative)
The people who handle your servers/routers or run cables are not grunts, the reason they make 50-100k is because maintaining your system services requires major skill and dedication while cabling is tiresome and dangerous work akin to electrical wiring. These are big jobs and if you're offering $35k a year then you have absolutely nobody to blame but yourself if the only applicants are incompetent and dishonest.
Re:there is no shortage... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Digital records are NOT a good thing (Score:2, Informative)
Working in the medical field myself, I can tell you that digitizing makes things faster, not slower. Back when it was all paper, you still had to take just as many notes and chart just as much stuff... you simply had to do it with a pen, and if you made a mistake, you had to cross it out in red, file it anyway, and go get a blank chart to copy it all onto. Then there was also the travel time aspect; when patient C was issued a new RX, you had to physically walk down to records to get the medication history and allergies report for the doctor. Now you just pull it up on the console in the operatory. All notes that are required now have always been required; the only difference is that now people can enter them with a keyboard, instead of needing good penmanship. Trust me, getting a records transfer from another clinic that does not use electronic records is always a pain; do you have any idea how poorly some nurses & assistants can write?!
Uh, that's a GOOD thing. (Score:2, Informative)
Most of these peeps have Analyst in thier title and many came from other areas of the organization (nursing, med techs, etc). I think there are maybe 3 or 4 of us with a realistic IT background that have actual skills to solve problems..
My wife is currently using this iPhone/iTouch medical app for her NP program. Long story short, the UI and the selections make absolutely no sense from a practitioner's standpoint. Once, after swearing at it, she asked what the fuck they were thinking. I answered, "Honey, it was probably designed and developed by programmers that have no clue what a practitioner needs or uses in a system." I know, I've worked on some medical systems for a very large medical software company that everyone in the business would know who they are and I've had to rework a few things myself because they didn't work from a practitioner's perspective.
So, it's a good thing that at least some of the practitioners are involved.
Re:Digital records are NOT a good thing (Score:2, Informative)
bad in the old ways the doctor made a few salient notes here and there and 90% of the time was used to address issues and or questions about my sons health instead of dicking around with a computer.
The problem with the "bad old ways" was that no-one could read the doctor's writing. If the data is entered into the EHR, not only can all of the other care providers that see your son understand what your doctor entered, but if the entries are coded correctly using one of the standardized medical vocabularies like SNOMED-CT, for example, then the computerized decision support systems can look at your son's condition and alert the provider before the inject him with something that will kill him. Being able to see your son's complete medical history, including medications, conditions and allergies will go a long way to prevent medical errors. If I cannot read your doctor's hand written notes, there is no medical history. One doctor described having to prescribe medications without being able to see the patient's current medications and medical history as "prescribing blind."