HITPC: ONC Workforce Development Program led to employment gains

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s (ONC’s) Workforce Development Program trained thousands of students and helped bolster their employment prospects, according an evaluation of the program presented at the Health IT Policy Committee meeting on March 11.

ONC launched the $116 million grant program in 2010 with the goal of training a new workforce of health IT professionals to help providers implement and optimize EHRs to improve healthcare quality, safety and cost-efficiency.

About two-thirds of the 1,704 university-based and 19,733 community college students were employed in health IT or health IT-related responsibilities six months after program completion, reported Health IT Workforce Development subgroup co-chair Norma Morganti, executive director of health IT at Corporate College, a division of Cuyahoga Community College. Also, the program spurred curriculum development with 20 components developed that were downloaded 18,000 times. More than 9,500 HITPro exams were administered.

Morganti shared a number of cross-cutting findings:

• The rapid implementation posed challenges for structured communication, but she said, “There was still a lot of innovation in the work regardless of coordination at the start.”
• ONC’s decision to allow grantees flexibility was a great asset and participants appreciated the opportunity to use online learning platforms.
• Schools’ efforts to forge connections with the employer community were critical. “Many employers were unaware of the training programs. However, once they learned about them, they felt confident the training could fill gaps in the workforce,” she said.

With the groundwork complete, Morganti discussed sustainability of the program. She said colleges and universities are moving ahead with their current curriculum and infusing it into other areas in the healthcare space, including nursing education. Now that the grant money has dried up, they are charging students for training and some colleges plan to allow students more than six months to complete their training and to focus more on hands-on and virtual lab training.

Morganti also noted that the American Health Information Management Association converted HITPro for its healthcare technology specialist certification.

“The challenge of the work group is how do we advocate to sustain new materials coming out, and how do we curate others,” she said. To that end, the work group asked subject matter experts to share best practices and where they found good resources. The feedback was incorporated into the development of a framework on workforce competencies for patient-centered healthcare delivery through health IT.

“There is additional work needed around training and what will be needed for new workers entering the healthcare space and what competencies they need to support health IT,” Morganti said. “It’s moving fast, and transformation will require more training and different modalities of that training.”

The full Workforce Program Summative Evaluation Report is published here.