Health Information Technology Training for Safety Net Clinics in Central Texas – A St. David's Foundation Community Fund Grant awarded to The UT Austin Health IT Program, June 2011

One unexpected consequence of the lack of an adequately trained Health IT workforce in the United States is that medical professionals are being asked to expand their scope of work to include Health IT responsibilities without having any formal training in the field. Clinical providers are interacting with technologies at the point of care without a thorough knowledge or understanding of these systems. Moreover, front-line clinic staff have few resources to access HIT education on-the-job, much less customized training designed to assist them with achieving meaningful use. Meeting this educational gap is a priority of the University of Texas at Austin Health IT program. In June 2011, the program was the recipient of a one year grant from the St. David's Foundation (link to St. David's foundation http://www.stdavidsfoundation.org/) to provide Health IT educational programming for medical personnel in three safety net clinics served by the Foundation – El Buen Samaritano, Lone Star Circle of Care, and People's Community Clinic. The Health IT faculty are providing 24 hours of generalized Health IT education to 45 clinic staff, who are dedicated to improving healthcare access and quality for underserved individuals in our community. Clinic managers have chosen to focus the training on the topics of change management, clinic workflow, quality improvement, project management basics, teamwork and leadership. Interactive sessions are being customized to meet each clinic's needs.

 

 

Health IT Executive Education for Employees of the Office of e-Health Coordination, Texas Department of Health and Human Services, August, 2012

Faculty in the UT Austin Health IT program developed and delivered 60 hours of essential content and experiential learning to 10 employees of the Office of e-Health Coordination, Texas Department of Health and Human Services encompassing three broad areas: clinical and financial concepts, the theory and use of electronic health record systems and the theory and use of health information exchange. Training occurred in the Health IT Learning Center in the Norman Hackerman building over a two month period from September – October, 2012.