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."

Comments

yeah, sure is a lack of unemployed IT types

[FuckingNickName]

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?

This is corporate welfare.

[Senes]

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.

there is no shortage...

[snooo53]

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.

Re:there is no shortage...

[beakerMeep]

You know, as a fellow developer, I often underestimate the colossal job IT has. It's not just a matter of following a few "compliance guidelines you can learn in a few hours." This sounds to me more like training on how to install, maintain, and support EMR systems. And not only that but how to help the non-technical people (ie doctors) learn them. If you think the job of IT supporting EMR systems is somehow akin to Homer Simpson pressing the "Vent Toxis Gas now" button, you're fooling yourself and insulting the whole of the IT industry to boot. EMRs are supposed to be capable of storing someone's lifetime history of any combination of symptoms and diseases and maintained under strict HIPPA privacy guidelines. And, the number of patients and doctors to support increases the complexity significantly.

I think your label of "government handout" is very presumptuous.

Re:there is no shortage...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is for existing IT field people

[syntap]

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.

Re:drug testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

This is just the rise of evil diploma mills

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:The government focus on healthcare is troubling

[shaitand]

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.