The health IT workforce development program, established with funding from the HITECH Act, is on track to train the right workers for the right jobs, a panel of community college and university administrators told attendees at a HIMSS11 session Tuesday.

“We are currently working on version 2  to deliver to the community colleges in May,” said William Hersch, MD, professor and chairman of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University. He noted that the grant will end on April 2, 2012.

“We’re looking at how to sustain it,” he said.

“I think we are all envisioning this tsunami about 20 miles offshore,” said Norma Morganti, executive director of the MidWest Community College Health Information Technology Consortium, which provides training to support electronic health records implementation across 10 Midwest states.

The six roles targeted by this program are:

• Clinician/Public Health Leader;
• Health Information Management and Exchange Specialist;
• Health Information Privacy and Security Specialist;
• Research and Development Scientist;
• Programmers and Software Engineer; and
• Health IT Sub-specialist.

[See also: Clinical IT professionals hard to find]

The colleges started training in September. Morganti said they have an “incredible quality of students” and experienced faculty.

“We are also talking to you in our communities to find out exactly what is the need and customize it,” she added.

The $70 million countrywide community college program established five regional consortia of 85 community colleges to develop short-term certificate programs to train 10,000 individuals per year in the six community college workforce roles.

[See also: IT certifications increasingly important to hiring proces]

Northern Virginia Community College is using a $6 million grant to develop and provide initial administration of a set of HIT competency examinations focused on the six community college job roles.

“Employers, basically, we’re doing this for you,” said Brian Foley, the college’s provost. “We’re here to met your needs.”

“The labor department is telling us that (the nation needs) 51,000 new health IT workers over the next five years,” said Robert E. Burke, principal investigator at George Washington University. The challenge, he said, is “recruiting sufficient numbers of folks into these new health IT fields.”