What An Amazing Gift For Those Who Want to Teach and Learn About Health IT!

This fantastic bit of news came out a day or so ago.

ONC offers health IT teaching materials

By Joseph Conn

Posted: June 24, 2011 - 10:15 am ET

A trove of free health information technology teaching materials for higher education has been opened to the public by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The $10 million, ONC-funded Curriculum Development Centers Program produced the materials, which have been in use since last fall by members of the 82-school ONC Community College Consortia Program. The community colleges operate six-month, health IT certificate training courses. The goal of both programs is to close an estimated 50,000-employee shortage in the nation's health IT workforce.

The teaching materials, developed by five, four-year universities that make up the Curriculum Development Center Program, could pull double and even triple duty as frameworks for IT courses at the undergraduate and even the graduate level, according to Dr. Bill Hersh, professor and chairman of the medical informatics and clinical epidemiology department at Oregon Health & Science University, one of the five development center schools. The other four curriculum-development schools are University of Alabama at Birmingham, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Duke University. Oregon also works with ONC under a separate contract to serve as the National Training and Dissemination Center to help coordinate curriculum-development activities and to serve as a repository and dissemination point for the educational materials.

“If you're starting a new educational program or have an existing one, it just makes it easier because there is all this content already developed on all the topics you would expect,” Hersh said. The materials aren't for exclusive use by community colleges, Hersh said.

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The materials are all available online at www.onc-ntdc.org or www.onc-ntdc.info.

More here:

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20110624/NEWS/306249986/

Here is the link from the US Government.

http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=1807&mode=2

Curriculum Development Centers Program

The purpose of the Curriculum Development Centers Program, one component of the ONC Workforce Program, is to provide funding to institutions of higher education (or consortia thereof) to support health information technology curriculum development. The materials developed under this program will be used by the member colleges of the regional Community College Consortia as well as be available to institutions of higher education across the country.

In April 2010, ONC awarded $10 million in federal funds to five domestic institutions of higher education to develop curriculum and instructional materials to enhance workforce training programs primarily at the community college level. One of the awardees under this program, Oregon Health & Science University, received additional funding to serve as the National Training and Dissemination Center (NTDC). The NTDC has established a secure electronic site from which all materials may be downloaded.

Curriculum Development Centers Program Awardees:

• Oregon Health & Science University $2,720,000 (includes $900,000 for NTDC)

• University of Alabama at Birmingham $1,820,000

• Johns Hopkins University $1,820,000

• Columbia University $1,820,000

• Duke University $1,820,000

The curriculum materials are now available to the public on the NTDC website at http://www.onc-ntdc.org or http://www.onc-ntdc.info .

To access the courses you need to register and provide some details on the site. Once you have done that you can see the treasure trove available.

Here is the top level table of contents of the material.

0. Blueprints Components 1-20

1. Introduction to Health Care and Public Health in the U.S.

2. The Culture of Health Care

3. Terminology in Health Care and Public Health Settings

4. Introduction to Information and Computer Science

5. History of Health Information Technology in the U.S.

6. Health Management Information Systems

7. Working with Health IT Systems

8. Installation and Maintenance of Health IT Systems

9. Networking and Health Information Exchange

10. Fundamentals of Health Workflow Process Analysis & Redesign

11. Configuring EHRs

12. Quality Improvement

13. Public Health IT

14. Special Topics Course on Vendor-Specific Systems

15. Usability and Human Factors

16. Professionalism/Customer Service in the Health Environment

17. Working in Teams

18. Planning, Management and Leadership for Health IT

19. Introduction to Project Management

20. Training and Instructional Design

For those who are interested this is a very large and fascinating gift. Be aware there are many large (20 meg a time) files to be browsed.

Enjoy and be grateful!

David.