Health IT trainees begin hitting job market

Physicians looking for help preparing for meaningful use are getting some good news. There are thousands of newly certified health IT professionals looking for work.

About 3,000 students have completed health IT training at various community colleges out of the 10,500 who hope to complete training by 2012, according to the Health and Human Services Dept.'s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The ONC's Health IT Workforce Development Program was started with $115 million in funding as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package. The community college work force development programs were funded with $68 million of that money. The schools received the grants to launch or improve nondegree health IT training programs that can be completed in six months or fewer. The first crop of students completed their training in the spring.

The program was designed to address the estimated shortfall of 50,000 health IT workers needed by health professionals hoping to earn federal bonuses by meeting meaningful use criteria. The ONC's goal is to produce a highly skilled work force of health IT workers that will help physicians and hospitals as they implement electronic medical records and work toward qualifying for incentive money.

"With more than 80,000 providers signed up through the [regional extension centers], we expect, over time, as they begin to implement [EMRs] into their practices, that there will be a strong market for our graduates," said ONC spokeswoman Nancy A.F. Szemraj.

The majority of program participants are midcareer professionals in either health care or IT, according to the ONC. Many community colleges reported that the majority of students already were employed and going through the program to gain new skills.

Fifty-eight percent of the students at the colleges representing the Midwest Community College HIT Consortium, one of five regional entities under the program, are employed full time, 37% of whom said they were seeking new employment, said Norma Morganti, executive director of the Midwest Consortium.

The program trains people to become practice workflow and information management redesign specialists, clinician/practitioner consultants, implementation support specialists, implementation managers, technical/software support workers or trainers.

Helen Figge, senior director of career services for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, said the graduates "are laying the foundation for roles that are evolving, and these roles will be defined more and more as the electronic technologies such as electronic health records continue to be implemented to support the meaningful use initiatives."

Jamie Husher, health IT educational specialist for Dakota State University, said the regional extension center in the state is helping physician practices assess what is needed for them to achieve meaningful use. Many have sent current employees through the programs to acquire needed skills. She said enrollment was slow at first, but once the students realized it was good training, others from local health care organizations followed.

HIMSS worked with the ONC to develop a job board for program participants. Physicians looking for employees with specific skills or backgrounds can post job listings on the site, or look through resumes posted by those in the program (link).