Feds To Help Train 50,000 Health IT Workers 212
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Soulskill
from the bears-need-time-off-too dept.
from the bears-need-time-off-too dept.
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."
As an IT worker in the healthcare industry... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is just the rise of evil diploma mills (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a movement in the Obama admin to take away these pseudo-school's eligibility for gov't if they can't show 80% of their graduates get jobs in their field and actually enforcing it. Right now they're skirting around these regulations by claiming stuff like call center work is 'IT'.
Anyway, if the gov't really gave a flying fsck they'd stop the H1-B Visa program dead. At any rate this is just more free money for the rich. Yea America.
Digital records are NOT a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been in hospitals with digitized systems. The nurses simply don't have the time to do data entry on top of their jobs.
It's hard enough grabbing the pills and running room to room without having to stop after each one, scan the cup into the system, fix the system when it doesn't log the cup correctly or the patient opt'd not to take the drugs yet or has a script that gives a different number of pills at night vs day or spit the pills out and she needs to get more.
Now you have nurses with several cups of pills they have to hold because the digital system already has them checked out. Patients who can't get medication because the nurse can't just go get more pills to replace the ones she knows weren't taken. People who aren't attended to at all because the nurse has to spend an extra 15 minutes per patient per room stop to handle data entry overhead.
Re:there is no shortage... (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who as worked in healthcare IT for a grand total of 5 years now I can tell you that we (Americans) and in severe trouble. This entire industry needs to be scrapped and outsourced to private industry asap. The level of incompentency is simply staggering. You have to understand a very large portion of healthcare (beyone the large private HMOs) is delivered by state institutions. That means safety net hospitals, state institutions, and hospitals that operate inside or parellel to higher ed instituions. I work on an applications team of about 80 folks (yeah 80 no shit). 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....e.g., understand relational databases, know a scripting language, undersand basic operational guidelines of managing large complex systems. Basically the modus opandi here is to throw a bunch of money at our prefered vedors and hope that we get a positive result. Combine this with a culture of "never fire anyone for any reason" and you get the worst of the worst case scenarios. This isn't FUD and I am absolutely not blowing this out of propotion. If our education system operates on any of the same principles that I see here (and I think it does), then its starting to become really clear about why thats in the shitter too. On the other hand.....good place to be when there is 15% unemployment....for now.
Re:yeah, sure is a lack of unemployed IT types (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:there is no shortage... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently you've never done IT work, because you demonstrate a severe lack of understanding of what's involved.
(Oh wait, you're a developer; everyone's job but your's is easy!)
Altering a couple toggles or switching a few bits is not the half of it. While a developer can release a bug fix at any time they so please (or not at all, as so fucking often appears to be the case) IT tends to suffer directly for a developers' shortsightedness. The people who use a developer's software rely on IT people to make it work and to remain that way. Due to poor development standards (no/poor QC/QA, amateur hour, etc.) this is usually not a terribly fun or easy process. There are often dozens if not hundreds of "gotchas" you won't find anywhere else.
If it were just a matter of HIPAA compliance, I'd agree. But it's never that simple. There is a significant skillset for healthcare IT that the average IT monkey will never touch. Setting aside the need to not only understand the users' work process, but someone at 1st or 2nd level support in healthcare needs to understand medical terms and the roles and obligations of almost everyone in the organization.
Oh, and we've got to deal with doctors and nurses. You thought Chatty Cathy (the man hater in HR who just plays solitaire all day and talks on the phone) was a pleasant phone call...