The Federal Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, promulgates the meaningful use of health information technology to improve the quality of health care in the United States. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, the HITECH Act provides assistance to institutions of higher learning to establish or expand health information technology education programs to advance the deployment of the electronic health record within a very short time frame of five years. The Workforce Program provides approximately $70 million in assistance through cooperative agreements to five regional consortia consisting of 85 Community colleges across the nation. The focus of this funding is to develop short-term certificate programs to train 10,000 individuals per year in six workforce roles.
Broward College is one of three colleges in Florida awarded stimulus funding to provide training for the workforce roles. Broward College’s service area consists of Broward, Charlotte, Collier, Dade, Glades, Hendry, Lee, Sarasota, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties.
Qualified individuals must either have a health care background or an information technology background to be eligible for the workforce certificate programs. The training goals focus on bridging the knowledge gap for experienced health care or information technology practitioners who must complete their training of one or more of the workforce roles within a six-month period.
Training is funded until April 2, 2012 in six health/IT priority workforce roles, including:
– Practice workflow and information management redesign specialists
– Clinician/practitioner consultants
– Implementation support specialists
– Implementation managers
– Technical/software support staff
– Trainers
Every role consists of 9 to 13 courses. Tuition for each course is $50.00. Upon completion of their first certificate (only), students will receive 50% tuition reimbursement. There are no additional costs as all learning materials are contained in the courses. Training in each of these roles will take six months or less, are fully online, and are self-paced. Students who complete their initial certificate program may continue taking courses for another certificate at the cost of $50.00 per course. Since the core courses will have already been completed, it will be possible to obtain another certificate in a shorter amount of time.
This curriculum was developed through federal funding by five of the foremost academic centers in the country, including Oregon Health & Science University, Duke University, Columbia University, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Johns Hopkins University.