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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."
How often must the government / industry claim there is a lack of qualified workers in some field before people just laugh and wonder who wants to bring down whose salary?
How about giving them loans for training which are paid back as part of their salary once they've secured a job?
Instead of tapping into the underemployed IT labor resources, which would cost more money, businesses have instead successfully lobbied the federal government to spend its own money to solve their problems for them.
Were at Wal-Mart 2.0, now any job can be paid by government instead of the employers themselves.
I have a friend in I.T. and he regularly smokes pot and will occasionally take other things that mess him up. This *does* make him less reliable and he is less consistently available to work when scheduled.
Knowing him has made me more in favor of the employers right to test for drugs (as part of the employment contract).
I'd really like there to be some sort of disincentive for him being high as a kite (or recovering) whilst he is working on medical equipment that may be keeping someone alive.
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I find it extremely hard to believe there is any shortage of IT workers capable of doing healthcare development/implementation. I've actually worked with development for the healthcare IT industry and I could explain to any reasonably intelligent IT person the compliance guidelines they need to follow in a couple hours. This stuff isn't hard if you know your way around a computer; it's requirements like any other project in the world has. This is a government handout, pure and simple.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
I always hate to RTFA and burst the naysayer bubbles, but "the training programs are aimed at people who already have health care or IT backgrounds -- not workers from other fields who have no previous experience or training in either discipline." As such I don't think it is dilutive in terms of IT worker salaries... they are taking people would would have been in the IT workforce and steering them to healthcare.
This isn't the old "train the janitor to develop complex systems" move from dot-com era. However the article does not seem to address the possibility of recipients of this training going overseas with the expertise.
The original poster argues that invasive and unjustified prying into the private lives of employees is a disincentive to potential employees. You respond that anyone who questions those policies does drugs while on the job. You either missed the point or are purposefully ignoring it.
Making it a general programme for people with health care experience will work. Getting even into an entry level medical job entails around 6 years of school plus at least a year or two of work experience. There are exceptions for some specialties, like phlebotomy, where the training period is shorter. Even then it still is not knowledge that can be faked or made up for in a few months of side reading. However, legitimate IT backgrounds, if present in a small ratio, can provide skills and insight not available to those who have spent years getting domain expertise in medicine.
What can kill the project dead, dead, dead is if people with Windowz Skillz are allowed to pose as IT workers. Microsoft products have little to do with IT except that they are placeholders blocking legitimate, functioning protocols, formats, applications, and operating systems. The kind of slug that tries to make a living of of Microsoft products lacks the ability to analyze and solve problems. They're usually either rote memorization monkeys or sales marketeers. The bullshitting and lying that accompanies both the rote monkeys and the marketeers ends up costing lives when it happens in clinics and hospitals, especially when the ongoing Windows disasters collapse the hospital.
In most cases it is easier to add beginner, basic 'IT' skills to people with domain expertise than it is to try to shoehorn people without medical training and experience into the job. That and it's easier to just throw out all closed source rather than waste resources culling just the Microsofters.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
How do you know the pot messes him up on a long-term basis? He could just be naturally unreliable.
There is a major difference between being presently intoxicated (which would be grounds for firing anyway) and having had a smoke in the past couple of weeks (which a drug test could yield a positive from.)
... I say "bring it on". The IT department at the hospital I work at is bloated, inefficient, and ineffective. A lot of it has to do with our leadership and lax corporate culture, but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that 25% of our IT department is made of nurses who have not a clue about technology, and the other 75% of it is made of technology people who know nothing about medicine/hospital work. I can honestly say that some of the wacky decisions the IT department has made out of ignorance have negatively affected our patient care. I doubt it's killed anyone, but it has caused unnecessary delays and confusion.
this is anecdotal at best and really speaks out more about your friend as a person than it does the effects of the drugs on him....
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
You are an asshole. Did it ever occur to you that there are people (myself included) that have NEVER used illegal drugs and yet refuse to be drug tested because it is a violation of our privacy and almost always with no probable cause?
1) You also have no idea what else they are testing for
2) You have no idea what information is shared and to whom
3) There is a absolute possibility of false positives that could ruin your reputation
Drug testing is evil, period. Legal drugs (such as alcohol and prescription drugs, even over-the-counter meds) can be just as debilitating. Even sleep deprivation can cause severe performance problems. And those that do choose to use a illegal drug on their own time don't necessarily affect their on-the-job performance.
If a company wants to ensure their workforce is not "impaired", then they should test for impairment through some type of coordination, response time, or mental exercise. Or perhaps even through observation of performance.
You may have left your sliderule out in the rain.
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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EMR is absolutely awesome, and with regards to the government push for it: it's about time.
I'm assuming your "unconstitutional" comment is with regards to privacy. I'm also assuming you have no idea how things currently work.
The concept behind EMR (Electronic Medical Records) is simply taking your medical data, previously filed on paper, and instead storing it on a computer. All the previous privacy regulation (mostly HIPAA) applies, as well as extra regulations (HITECH). The information is still behind firewalls and physical locked doors. The biggest operational difference is that now third parties (like insurance providers, pharmacies, specialists, labs, researchers, etc.) can get access to your data much faster, once they have enough credentials.
In the days of paper, a third-party representative would have to come into the hospital, go to a big room full of paper, stand there making copies of the records they need, then go back and have someone transcribe them all into a computer. For a while, all your data would be carried in a briefcase down the street, easily available for theft. Among the data the third party needs is a lot of other information they don't, but since it's on the same form, they see it anyway.
Now with EMR, the third-party computer system can just connect to the hospital, and supply their credentials to gain access. At the hospital I work with, that means two rounds of username/passwords, plus a physical token. That's far more secure than simply needing a hospital badge and a good excuse. The records are pulled by request, so there's no extra information given. If the third party (like a pharmacy) doesn't need to know about your religious preference (kept by the hospital in case they have to call for last rites), they simply don't get it. Once the electronic medical data's in transit, it's also more secure. There's no briefcases to grab here. Instead, there's an encrypted connection inside an encrypted VPN. When the data arrives at the third party's office, it's easily formatted for their system, with no extra people staring at it.
All in all, EMR is far better than old processes. It's faster, more reliable (think of the stereotypical doctor's handwriting), and more secure.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
A cut in healthcare expenses puts just as much capital in consumer pockets as a tax cut. Arguably, unlike the tax cut, it puts the capital in the consumer pockets that are likely to need it.
Consumers then spend that money, into the productive economy but without screwing up a budget surplus.
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..
My wife is currently using this iPhone/iTouch medical app for her NP program. Long story short, the UI and the selections make absolutely no sense from a practitioner's standpoint. Once, after swearing at it, she asked what the fuck they were thinking. I answered, "Honey, it was probably designed and developed by programmers that have no clue what a practitioner needs or uses in a system." I know, I've worked on some medical systems for a very large medical software company that everyone in the business would know who they are and I've had to rework a few things myself because they didn't work from a practitioner's perspective.
So, it's a good thing that at least some of the practitioners are involved.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001