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Feds To Help Train 50,000 Health IT Workers
Lucas123 writes "The US Department of Health and Human Services is spending about $144 million on grant programs at more than 80 colleges and universities to help fill a void of about 50,000 workers for IT jobs in the healthcare industry. The workers are needed to help hospitals, physician practices and other healthcare entities to roll out electronic medical records, which the government is promoting through the use of reimbursement funds for those who implement EMRs and penalties for those who don't. The Health IT courses are set to begin this fall in five regions around the US and are aimed exclusively at workers who have previous IT or healthcare experience."
It's been going on for some time. A bunch of wealth asshats bought out a ton of regionally accredited schools and turned them into diploma mills for soaking up taxpayer money in exchange for fake educations. IT is really popular with these bastards because it's cheap as hell to train and the rubes these 'schools' prey on think there's lots of easy money in computers because they find them hard to understand.
There's a movement in the Obama admin to take away these pseudo-school's eligibility for gov't if they can't show 80% of their graduates get jobs in their field and actually enforcing it. Right now they're skirting around these regulations by claiming stuff like call center work is 'IT'.
Anyway, if the gov't really gave a flying fsck they'd stop the H1-B Visa program dead. At any rate this is just more free money for the rich. Yea America.
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I've been in hospitals with digitized systems. The nurses simply don't have the time to do data entry on top of their jobs.
It's hard enough grabbing the pills and running room to room without having to stop after each one, scan the cup into the system, fix the system when it doesn't log the cup correctly or the patient opt'd not to take the drugs yet or has a script that gives a different number of pills at night vs day or spit the pills out and she needs to get more.
Now you have nurses with several cups of pills they have to hold because the digital system already has them checked out. Patients who can't get medication because the nurse can't just go get more pills to replace the ones she knows weren't taken. People who aren't attended to at all because the nurse has to spend an extra 15 minutes per patient per room stop to handle data entry overhead.
As someone who as worked in healthcare IT for a grand total of 5 years now I can tell you that we (Americans) and in severe trouble. This entire industry needs to be scrapped and outsourced to private industry asap. The level of incompentency is simply staggering. You have to understand a very large portion of healthcare (beyone the large private HMOs) is delivered by state institutions. That means safety net hospitals, state institutions, and hospitals that operate inside or parellel to higher ed instituions. I work on an applications team of about 80 folks (yeah 80 no shit). Most of these peeps have Analyst in thier title and many came from other areas of the organization (nursing, med techs, etc). I think there are maybe 3 or 4 of us with a realistic IT background that have actual skills to solve problems....e.g., understand relational databases, know a scripting language, undersand basic operational guidelines of managing large complex systems. Basically the modus opandi here is to throw a bunch of money at our prefered vedors and hope that we get a positive result. Combine this with a culture of "never fire anyone for any reason" and you get the worst of the worst case scenarios. This isn't FUD and I am absolutely not blowing this out of propotion. If our education system operates on any of the same principles that I see here (and I think it does), then its starting to become really clear about why thats in the shitter too. On the other hand.....good place to be when there is 15% unemployment....for now.