Oregon Health & Science University, a recognized national leader in health information technology education, will expand its course offerings with the $5.8 million in government funds it was awarded recently.

The funding, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), was awarded to OSHU in two competitive grants. One will directly support the education of about 150 additional students over three years in OHSU's biomedical informatics graduate program while establishing additional capacity to meet the needs of an expanded workforce.

With the other award OHSU will develop health IT curricula and establish a training and dissemination center – one of five such centers across the country.

OHSU will help educate the estimated 50,000 professionals needed to convert the country to electronic health records by the year 2014. The recovery act authorizes an estimated $40 billion to achieve this goal.

"We are delighted to be able to contribute to the national initiative to educate the health IT professional workforce that will be required to lead the widespread adoption of electronic health records," says William Hersh, MD, professor and chairman of OHSU's Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology. "This workforce is a key requirement for achieving meaningful use of health information technology that will help to improve the quality and safety of healthcare while lowering its costs."

Graduate programs

With the funding, OHSU will provide financial aid for nearly 140 new students to enroll in and complete the university's online Graduate Certificate Program in Biomedical Informatics. The funding also will make it possible for at least 12 students to enroll in and complete OHSU's on-campus master's degree program. All financial aid under the grant is for students in graduate-level programs requiring a minimum of a bachelor's degree for admission.

Students receiving financial aid will be required to choose among six career paths:

• Clinician/public health leader
• Health information management and exchange specialist
• Health information privacy and security specialist
• Research and development scientist
• Programmers and software engineer
• Health IT sub-specialist

"Biomedical informatics is a growing field with opportunities for people with a variety of backgrounds, especially in healthcare, computer science and information technology," said Hersh. "Although this funding is focused on training professionals to implement electronic health records, there are numerous other career opportunities in such areas as personal health records, telemedicine, clinical and translational research, and bioinformatics."

Developing curricula

The National Training and Dissemination Center will support a total of five Curriculum Development Centers, one of which will be housed at OHSU. Together, the five centers will develop curricula for the five community college consortia being established to train community college students in healthcare IT. These curricula will also be made available to institutions of higher education throughout the nation. The National Training and Dissemination Center will house the curricula on a dedicated Web site, train community college faculty in its use, and collect and disseminate feedback on its content.

Besides OSHU, which was awarded $2.72 million (including $900,000 to establish the National Training and Dissemination Center) the following universities also received curriculum development centers grants – each $1.82 million

• University of Alabama at Birmingham    
• Johns Hopkins University                 
• Columbia University                                
• Duke University