Many healthcare professionals, especially those early in their careers, are facing a new challenge: locating and implementing useful and valid health informatics resources they can leverage to further their career advancement.

The HIMSS Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) Initiative & Community has curated tools and organized them into a set of online resources.

Supporting health professionals

Robert G. Brookshire, professor of integrated information technology at the University of South Carolina, is co-presenting Ignite Your Career With a Curated eHealth Toolkit, an educational session at the HIMSS20 Digital conference. He said the session enables attendees to recognize how a curated eHealth toolkit can support health professionals in using innovative global health informatics and technology to transform their careers and organization.

Further, he added, it will help attendees plan how this toolkit can be applied to individual skills enhancement and global workforce development within interprofessional healthcare environments.

The TIGER eHealth Toolkit contains practical eHealth resources for the interprofessional healthcare community in a handy, easy-to-use online toolkit and comprises the results of expansive global projects, virtual learning and recommendations based upon evidence-based practice, said Cory Stephens, RN-BC, nurse consultant for informatics at the National Institutes of Health, and Brookshire’s co-presenter.

“It is a PDF that lives on the TIGER website,” he explained. “It’s visually organized so it’s easy for you to find the tool that you want to use. And when you find it, you just click on it and it takes you to that resource, so you can learn more about it and bring it into your practice.”

The toolkit’s many components

It includes, among many things, the TIGER VLE, Virtual Learning Environment; IEDMS, Interactive Education Demonstrator Modules; foundational curricula; recent TIGER publications; and the TIGER/VLE Marketing Toolkit.

“One of the tools in the toolkit is the SKAD Framework: SKAD stands for Skills Knowledge Assessment Development Framework,” Stephens said. “It’s a 25-question self-assessment questionnaire to understand digital literacy skills. It educates users on their experience, exposure and understanding of all things digital. Users get a digital skills score and analysis. I encourage people to try this out.”

Another tool is called HITComp: Health IT Competencies Tool & Repository.

“This is a massive repository; it has so much information that you can filter through if you’re looking for specific competencies, skills or even definitions within the health IT world,” Stephens explained.

“It’s massive. I’ve never seen anything quite so extensive as this. You’ll get to see a tutorial video at the beginning because it’s so big you kind of have to watch that video to use it effectively. It’s a short video, two minutes long, and you’ll be running through the repository in no time.”

Still another component of the TIGER eHealth Toolkit is a series of global case studies.

It includes “22 studies by 50 contributing authors with examples of successes and best practices in education and training,” said Stephens. “You’ll have access to the executive summary, survey and gap analysis findings – quick and easy access because these are all online.”

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.