Latinos in Information Science and Technology Association (LISTA) and Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE) Announce Partnership to Further Digital Empowerment Initiatives.
LISTA and ADE partnership will work to facilitate digital advocacy, digital literacy,
job creation and economic development in regards to digital empowerment initiatives
Today, Latinos in Information Science and Technology Association (LISTA), the [...]
PODER 360 SPEAKS TO JAIME VALLES, CISCO’s Vice President on Latin America: Latin American Coming IT Revolution.
Latin America continues to drag behind the rest of the world when it comes to information technology, a brake on the region’s competitiveness. But Internet access is expected to explode [...]
RESULTS OF MENENDEZ’S MAJOR FORTUNE 500 DIVERSITY SURVEY
RESULTS OF MENENDEZ’S MAJOR FORTUNE 500 DIVERSITY SURVEY: REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN AND MINORITIES ON CORPORATE BOARDS STILL LAGS FAR BEHIND NATIONAL POPULATION.
Minorities represent 14.5% of corporate boards; women [...]
ADE Calls on Free Press to Explain Their True Motives
In a press release distributed Tuesday the Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE) called on the organization Free Press to explain the true motives behind a disturbing 40-page guide detailing a [...]
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to Address LISTA 3rd Annual National Tech-Latino 2030 Legislative Forum.
New York, NY, June 14th, 2010 – Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association’s President and CEO, Jose A. Marquez-Leon proudly announced today that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will deliver remarks on the National Broadband Plan at LISTA’s upcoming 3rd Annual National Tech-Latino 2030 Legislative Forum on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC at 6:00 pm – 8:30pm on Tuesday June 22nd 2010.
“It is a great honor to have Chairman Genachowski address our members at our 3rd Annual National Tech-Latino 2030 Legislative Forum,” said Tony Jimenez LISTA National Board of Directors Chairman. “Chairman Genachowski has been an advocate for the Latino community and understands the critical role broadband plays in developing businesses and improving the economy for all Americans.”
“We are extremely pleased to have Chairman Genachowski address our members at our 3rd Annual National Tech-Latino Legislative Forum,” said Jose A. Marquez Leon. “Chairman Genachowski recognizes the role of the nation’s Latino technology sector and how broadband will help the Latino community continue to develop businesses and our positive impact on the economy of the United States. He understands that closing the digital divide once and for all will give all Americans the chance to achieve the American Dream of financial independence and economic empowerment.”
“Having Chairman Genachowski participate in LISTA’s Tech-Latino Legislative Forum is a testament to the recognized impact Latinos will have in our nation’s high-tech future,” said Danny Vargas. He added, “We sincerely appreciate the Chairman’s interest and dedication to ensuring that the FCC continues to engage all segments of American society and encourages Latinos to take a leading role in not only telecommunications but all aspects of innovation.”
The 3rd Annual National Tech-Latino Legislative Forum will provide Latino IT professionals an opportunity to dialogue with members of Congress about key concerns in the industries of Science, Technology Math and Engineering. It will also provide LISTA an opportunity to continue to raise awareness of the digital divide and how to bridge it, develop ideas on how to stimulate the growth of technology business, and be a catalyst of change in the high-technology and science sectors.
Event Information
3rd Annual National Tech-Latino Legislative Forum is generously sponsored by MicroTech, Capitol Wire PR. Uber Operations, Broadband for America, NTIA, ADE, State Farm, Aetna and Comcast
Date: Tuesday, June 22 2010
Time: 6pm – 9 pm
Opening Reception Venue:
Rayburn House Office Building,
Room B-338, Basement, Washington, DC 20515
To Attend Please Visit: www.techlatino2030.org
About Chairman Genachowski
Julius Genachowski was nominated by President Barack Obama as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on March 3, 2009, and sworn into office on June 29, 2009.
Chairman Genachowski has two decades of experience in public service and the private sector. Prior to his appointment, he spent more than 10 years working in the technology industry as an executive and entrepreneur. He co-founded LaunchBox Digital and Rock Creek Ventures, where he served as Managing Director, and he was a Special Advisor at General Atlantic. In these capacities, he worked to start, accelerate, and invest in early- and mid-stage technology and other companies. From 1997-2005, he was a senior executive at IAC/InterActiveCorp, a Fortune 500 company, where his positions included Chief of Business Operations and General Counsel.
Genachowski’s public service spanned broadly across government. His confirmation as FCC Chairman returns him to the agency where, from 1994 until 1997, he served as Chief Counsel to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, and, before that, as Special Counsel to then-FCC General Counsel (later Chairman) William Kennard. Previously, he was a law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice David Souter and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. , and at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for Chief Judge Abner Mikva. Genachowski also worked in Congress for then-U.S. Representative (now Senator) Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and on the staff of the House select committee investigating the Iran-Contra Affair.
Genachowski has been active at the intersection of social responsibility and the marketplace. He was part of the founding group of New Resource Bank, which specializes in serving the needs of green entrepreneurs and sustainable businesses, and has served on the Advisory Board of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2). He also served as a board member of Common Sense Media, a leading non-partisan, non-profit organization seeking to improve the media lives of children and families.
Genachowski received a J.D from Harvard Law School (magna cum laude), where he was co-Notes Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He received a B.A. from Columbia College (magna cum laude), where he was Editor of Columbia Spectator’s Broadway Magazine, re-established Columbia’s oldest newspaper (Acta Columbiana), and was a writer and researcher for Fred Friendly. He was also a certified Emergency Medical Technician who served on the Columbia Area Volunteer Ambulance, and taught cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
About Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA)
LISTA (www.a-lista.org) promotes the utilization of the technology sectors for the empowerment of the Latino community. We are an organization that is committed to bringing various elements of Technology under one central hub to facilitate our partners, members and the community with the leverage and education they need to succeed in a highly advanced technologically driven society.
So What’s Wrong With Arizona’s New Immigration Law? Guest Blogger: Luis J. Diaz, Esq.President and CEO, USHAA
So What’s Wrong With Arizona’s New Immigration Law?
Guest Blogger: Luis J. Diaz, Esq.
President and CEO
The United States Hispanic Advocate Association (USHAA)
Luis J. Diaz has over 20 years of extensive experience in a wide range of complex matters including intellectual property law, technology related joint ventures and strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, sales and marketing, and government relations. Mr. Diaz provides legal and business counsel to business units, » read more »
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So What’s Wrong With Arizona’s New Immigration Law?
Arizona’s recently enacted immigration law (SB 1070, as amended by HB2162) makes the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and requires the local police to check immigration status and to detain anyone on mere “reasonable suspicion“ of being in the country illegally following a “lawful stop, detention or arrest.” The law has generated great debate. Advocates say it is needed to fight crime resulting from illegal immigration. Opponents say it will result in the violation of civil liberties. It is an issue that requires a subtantial analysis based on facts, an understanding of American history, and a review of legal precedents involving the abuse and limits of police power.
FACTS & ISSUES
As confirmed by a recent study from PEW Research Center, the fact is that one in four Americans believe that Hispanics are the racial/ethnic group subject to the most discrimination in America. The study found that 32% of Hispanics 16 or older say they or someone they know has experienced discrimination. Less than half of Hispanics believe that police officers in their community treat Latinos fairly. And, most police chiefs around the country, concerned about the chilling effect of this law, oppose it because of its negative impact on their ability to fight crime, obtain witness cooperation, and other concerns.
Despite recent amendments to fix the more obvious problems of SB 1070, the law still provides no guidelines as to what is meant by “reasonable suspicion” in the context of alien status: is it 3 or more Hispanics in a car, a red bandana, a plaid shirt, a migrant worker in the field, or someone speaking Spanish? The reality is that “reasonable suspicion” likely will mean those looking like, sounding like, or acting like the stereotypical undocumented immigrant. However, police officers will be trained to write down things not related to race on their reports like the swerving car, a crooked license plate, talking on a mobile, the seatbelt being unfastened, or some other similar statement that will be difficult to disprove in a court of law and that will pit the relative credibility of a uniformed officer against that of a stereotypical poor immigrant. Notably, Governor Brewer has already announced training on the the subject of “reasonable suspicion” for police officers that one assumes are already experts on the subject.
If the Arizona law is really targeted at crime prevention stemming from the border, then it would be logical and workable if it simply required “probable cause” of some “criminal activity” before police could check immigration status. While the difference between “probable cause” and “reasonable suspicion” may not seem apparent to a lay person, these are two very different legal standards.
HISTORY & PRECEDENTS
Millions of Americans have shed blood in many wars to preserve the civil rights we now treasure. There are 200 years of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence supporting the proposition that police powers must be narrowly limited to prevent abuse of individual rights – something our founding fathers recognized. Also, the mission of police officers is to fight crime – not to act as immigration agents. Thus, any law that creates supercops with immigration superpowers and that, in its actual application, makes it possible to target, arrest, search and seize persons with certain physical attributes is by its nature suspect and should require a higher standard. On a cursory reading of the law, we are reminded of the phrase made famous by Hitler’s infamous Gestapo: “Show me your papers, are your papers in order?” The main difference is that with SB 1070 no “jewish star of David” is necessary for an Arizona supercop to identify the stereotypical immigrant.
Like the Japanese interment laws of the 1940’s, the Arizona law undermines the very notions of equal justice and basic fairness that are fundamental values of every American. As with the interment laws, this legislation is being driven by fear and hysteria and it is expressly directed at a group of people whose physical attributes identify them on first glance as members of a specific racial group. The failure of political leadership in Arizona has allowed people that may “look Mexican” to be singled out whether citizens or not.
Based on our history, we can now anticipate the development of a laundry list of “permissible factors” that can be cited after the fact to justify a “reasonable suspicion” even though race was in fact the first glance consideration in the initial stop. As noted, Governor Brewer has announced training on the the subject of “reasonable suspicion.” It is forseeable that Arizona’s effort to create supercops with immigration powers will spread like a cancer to other states across the country that do not border Mexico, thereby greatly magnifying the potential civil rights violations to all Hispanic citizens that may look “illegal.”
If left unchecked, history teaches that this law could place this great nation on the same slippery slope created by the interment laws, the House Un-American efforts of Senator McCarthy, and similar dark episodes in our history where fear has been used to justify the breach of American civil rights. The eventual apology will ring hollow as it has in times past. In 1988 Congress ultimately passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the interment of Japanese Americans and acknowledged that the government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
SO WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
The problem starts in Mexico. Thus, any real solution to the problem of illegal immigration and related criminal activity must involve (i) securing our borders, (ii) enacting stronger anti-crime measures, (iii) passing immigration reforms that make economic sense, and (iv) imposing economic sanctions against trade countries that contribute to these types of problems. The Arizona law does not address any of these issues. Instead, it targets the victims of failed policies by both Mexico and the United States. This is equivalent to trying to stop drug trafficking by targeting users and not pushers. We must call on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration legislation to fix our broken immigration laws and to hold our preferred trade partners like Mexico accountable, whether or not it hurts the economic interests of some large Mexican companies and their American partners in the short run.
USHAA is an award-winning non-profit providing economic advocacy, benefits and education programs to ensure that its business and individual members have equal access to contracts, jobs, education and other opportunities provided by our great nation.
Working on IT: 50,000 New Health IT workers Needed by Joseph Conn / HITS
Working on IT
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as the stimulus law, has a host of tight deadlines for its myriad health information technology subsidy and IT network development initiatives.
Nearly all of them are timed to help fulfill the ambitious goal set by former President George W. Bush in 2004 and adopted by President Barack Obama last year to make electronic health records available to most Americans by 2014.
Not surprisingly, a federally funded health IT workforce training effort is both part of the overall program and caught up in its mad rush.
“We are moving fast,” said Patricia Dombrowski, director of the Life Science Informatics Center at Bellevue (Wash.) College, which is leading a consortium of community colleges that applied for and won $3.4 million in workforce training grants funded by the stimulus law—covering career paths from information management to IT hardware installation.
Preparations at the college are moving so fast, “We were talking about using roller skates this morning, but we raised our hands,” Dombrowski said. “We knew the time line, so I really feel confident moving forward.”
Last month, HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology awarded $112 million of stimulus funds to dozens of universities and community colleges such as Bellevue for various IT workforce training and advanced-education programs ranging from six-month certificates through post-graduate degrees.
The faculties and administrators at those schools will be preparing feverishly for the fall semester and the first influx of what they hope will be thousands of new health IT students and job seekers.
Feeling the need
Boosting employment nationwide was a major goal of the stimulus law, and there is little doubt, according to the government and industry leaders, that tens of thousands of new jobs will be needed if the federal effort to push provider adoption of EHRs is to be successful.
Under the stimulus law, both physicians and hospitals seeking subsidy payments for their IT purchases must use certified EHRs in a meaningful manner. Last December, the ONC and CMS issued rules for certification and meaningful use. In response to thousands of subsequent public comments, both rules are likely to be modified sometime this spring.
The National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates there are 308,900 office-based physicians who are not federal employees, who are not working for a hospital’s ambulatory-care program, and who are not radiologists, anesthesiologists or pathologists.
Almost half of these doctors are either in solo practice or work in partnership with just one other physician. According to the latest NCHS data available—the 2009 estimates from its National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey—only 21% of these office-based physicians have a “basic” EHR.
By NCHS definition, a basic system has rudimentary capabilities, including the ability to create patient problem lists and clinical notes and do electronic prescribing. Although it’s not part of the definition, a basic system most likely lacks sufficient functionality to be certified under ONC rules and thus be considered to be an EHR system worthy of reimbursement under the multibillion-dollar stimulus technology subsidy program that is dominating the health IT landscape.
Just 6% of all office-based physicians use what the NCHS defines as a “fully functional” EHR. Such a system might have enough bells and whistles—such as automatic warnings of drug interactions and out-of-range test levels—that a physician using one might reasonably expect to qualify for federal EHR subsidy payments under the stimulus law, based on current drafts of ONC and CMS rules.
But even these advanced EHR systems are likely to require vendor upgrades to meet proposed ONC certification criteria, while many clinicians will still be expected to change their workflows and reporting requirements to fully qualify for EHR subsidy payments under proposed CMS meaningful-use standards.
On average, hospitals are a bit higher up the IT adoption curve than physician offices, but most hospitals are still a long way from where they’ll need to be to achieve meaningful use under the proposed CMS criteria.
Computerized physician order entry is an advanced EHR function in hospitals. According to the CMS proposed rule, to qualify for federal EHR subsidy payments under the Medicare portion of the stimulus law, hospitals must run 10% of their orders through a CPOE system for a 90-day period sometime during the first year of the program, which starts this fall.
Jason Hess, general manager of clinical research at KLAS Enterprises, Orem, Utah, a health IT market research firm, said its latest survey data, validated between October 2009 and February 2010, show only about 16% of hospitals have CPOE systems up and running.
“And if you look at those that are doing 50% of their orders or more through CPOE, it’s 11.3%,” Hess said.
Given the low levels of adoption and use, Hess asked whether it is even “realistic” for the CMS to require that all hospitals have CPOE installed in the first year and “get 10% of orders through CPOE.”
Talk of a looming labor shortage problem is on a lot of IT buyers’ lips, Hess said. Some of the vendors are trying to address the problem by offering remote hosting services for their products, he said, but it remains to be seen whether the software-as-a-service delivery model will catch on fast enough and be used widely enough to make a dent in the workforce shortfall.
Small, rural and community hospitals will feel the stress most severely.
“It’s kind of the Wild West for these folks who say we’ve got to do all the things the big hospitals do,” Hess said.
Help wanted
For starters, thousands of workers will be needed to simply install these EHR systems, configure them to local needs and train clinicians and other healthcare workers in their use. Thousands more will be needed to keep them running and to squeeze the data from them to improve patient safety and quality of care and warrant the multibillion-dollar public investment in them.
Leaders of organizations representing the nation’s office-based physicians and hospitals are concerned their members might not be able do all that will be needed to qualify for EHR subsidies under current ONC and CMS rules, given the gap between their current IT adoption status and the high bar set for them in the December drafts.
On May 3, the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association and Federation of American Hospitals as well as a host of medical specialty societies sent a joint letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, calling for the government to dial back its proposed meaningful-use criteria as well as give them more time to meet its performance targets.
For both physicians and hospitals, time is money. The first “payment year” begins Oct. 1 under the Medicare portion of the EHR subsidy program, through which the bulk of the estimated $14 billion to $27 billion in federal IT reimbursements under the stimulus law is expected to flow.
The healthcare industry has not been caught unawares of an IT labor force shortage, even though the advent of such massive amounts of federal EHR subsidy payments have added a heightened sense of urgency.
Back in 2005, the American Health Information Management Association and American Medical Informatics Association formed a joint committee to try and gin up support for education and training in heath informatics and health information management.
They produced a report, Building the Work Force for Health Information Transformation in 2006. In a case of “be careful what you wish for,” one of that group’s specific recommendations was to seek federal legislation and support for healthcare IT adoption and funding for IT education and training.
The stimulus law, with its buckets of money for EHR subsidies and education was all that, but with tight timelines as a kicker.
What eventually flowed from the AHIMA/AMIA joint effort was a report released in 2008 laying down what the two groups concluded are the core competencies of professionals working with EHRs.
In addition, AMIA is leading an effort to create a board certification program for physicians in medical informatics with the first credentials being awarded in 2013.
AHIMA, meanwhile, supported the design and rollout of the Virtual Lab for EHRs that provides Web-based coursework to more than 125 associate, baccalaureate and post-graduate health information management, or HIM, degree programs.
The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged the medical records and health IT workforce in 2008 at about 173,000. About two in five HIM/HIT workers were employed by hospitals, with the rest scattered across physician offices, nursing homes, home health services and other outpatient centers.
Despite the current U.S. unemployment rate hovering just under 10%, the highest figures since 1983, job prospects for health IT workers “should be very good, particularly for technicians with strong computer skills” who will be “in particularly high demand,” according to a BLS report. The healthcare industry, it projected, will need another 35,000 of these positions by 2018, a 20% increase.
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Part two of a two-part series
Along with the push to ramp up the use of health information technology in hospitals and doctors’ offices comes the need for a highly skilled labor force to get the job done.
Dixon-Lee said that today many AHIMA members are doing the work of IT specialists at their hospitals and physician offices while others can be retrained for these new positions. CAHIIM-accredited programs graduate between 3,000 and 3,500 students a year, of which 600 receive bachelor’s degrees and the rest associate’s degrees, she said.
“Our data show a 95% placement rate, but we aren’t producing them fast enough,” said Dixon-Lee, who cited a 2009 private workforce study commissioned by AHIMA last year projecting the need for anywhere between 12,000 and 50,000 new health information professionals over the next eight years.
Many Modern Healthcare readers who participated in our most recent annual IT survey reported having a tough time recruiting and retaining IT staff. A majority of survey respondents (58%) indicated they’ll need to hire more IT staff in the next 12 months. Meanwhile, 49% of responding executives said they have a hard time hiring or retaining IT workers, most commonly, because of a scarcity of trained personnel, but also because of low wages for IT workers in healthcare compared with other industries.
Officials at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology think the demand for workers skilled in health IT will be even greater than the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests, but perhaps near the upper end of the numbers that Dixon-Lee cited.
“In the aggregate, we have estimated to get to meaningful use by almost all care venues in the country we’re going to need something like 50,000 more trained healthcare workers in these roles than the educational system as it currently exists can produce,” said Charles Friedman, chief scientific officer for the ONC and its point man on ONC-funded educational and workforce development programs. The goal is to have 10,500 new healthcare IT workers trained each year over five years.
“We believe most of the people who can benefit from this program will come into it already possessing part of what they will need to know,” Friedman said. “They will be either IT people who will need to know more about health, or health people who will need to know more about IT. I can’t say what the balance between those two is.”
Friedman said the ONC picked the six “career paths” that the community colleges will train students to take. Those jobs are: clinician/practitioner consultants; implementation managers; implementation support specialists; practice workflow and information management redesign specialists; technical/software support staffers; and trainers.
“We looked at the field as it was evolving, not as it is today, but as we expect it to evolve,” Friedman said. ONC staffers looked at all the activities under the stimulus law and the low EHR adoption rate “and said, OK, what’s going to be necessary to get these practices from paper to electronic, and what roles are needed,” and what is needed to do it properly?
Under the ONC-supported, six-month certificate programs, U.S. community colleges are expected to train 10,500 students a year over five years. For those programs, there will be no certification organization required to look over the shoulder of the 70 community colleges expected to churn out those graduates.
“It’s a bit early to be contemplating that,” Friedman said.
Instead, Friedman said, the ONC has awarded a $6 million grant to Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, to create and administer a competency examination for graduates of the community college training programs. AHIMA is “very much involved” in the grant, Friedman said.
The individual competency testing program was chosen as an alternative to certification, Friedman said, “to make it very clear this grant award is to assess objectively a certain set of competencies in each examinee who sits for the exam.
“This could evolve in the future into some kind of certification program,” he said.
Community college graduates of the six-month certificate programs won’t be required to sit for the competency exam, “but we hope they will,” Friedman said. Part of the money for the competency testing grant is to underwrite the cost of 20,000 students to sit for the exam for free, he said. “We’re considering this as a pump-priming mechanism to ensure enough sit for the exam to demonstrate its value.”
For the new student certificate holders, “We think it will improve their job prospects. Think of how colleges use the SAT exam to complement a student’s grades to enhance admission. I think in the same way, this exam will be a comparable assessment of a certain set of competencies,” Friedman said.
“For a prospective employer, it will be information above and beyond” the educational program, Friedman said. Data on pass-fail rates from the competency exams could be aggregated and reported back to the community colleges to help them assess their programs, he added.
Back to school
The university was a triple winner in the federal workforce grant competition, receiving a total of $5.8 million in funding for three programs—nearly $3.1 million for advanced training to medical professionals in healthcare informatics; more than $1.8 million to develop curricula to be used by community colleges to train healthcare IT workers; and $900,000 to serve as the National Training and Dissemination Center for the curriculum-development program.
Oregon Health & Science has an established, nationally recognized medical informatics program. At any given time, Hersh said, the university may have as many as 200 people enrolled in its postgraduate, 24-credit-hour certificate program and its 52-credit-hour, master’s degree in biomedical informatics program.
About two-thirds of the current enrollment in those programs consists of clinical professionals—with half of that group being physicians—and the remaining third being computer people, Hersh said.
The federal, advanced-education grants will be for scholarships to those programs, Hersh said, with the caveat being that enrollees in the federally funded graduate certificate programs must complete their work in 12 months, whereas in the past, a typical enrollee, who works and goes to school at the same time, often takes longer to complete the same course.
“If they do our graduate certificate program, they have to do it all in a year,” Hersh said, but the trade-off for the rush is, “in essence, people can get a free education.” Tuition for the certificate program is about $12,000. “We have 45 slots per year,” Hersh says. “The people who don’t get funded can still do the program.” It just won’t be subsidized, he added.
Aid recipients under this one-year, advanced educational grant program also must choose from six career paths: clinician/public health leader; health information management and exchange specialist; health information privacy and security specialist; research and development scientist; programmers and software engineers; and health IT subspecialist.
In addition to Oregon Health & Science, eight other universities will share in a total of $32 million in stimulus law funding for university-based, advanced IT education programs. They are: Columbia University; the University of Colorado at Denver’s College of Nursing; Duke University; George Washington University; Indiana University; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Minnesota; and Texas State University, San Marcos.
Along with its graduate-level programs, Oregon Health & Science, as part of its triple-win, will join Columbia, Duke and Johns Hopkins as well as the University of Alabama at Birmingham in sharing ONC grants totaling $10 million to develop curricula to support the six-month, community college IT certificate programs.
The new curricula will cover 20 different content categories, including history of health IT, installation and maintenance of health IT systems, project management, and the use of IT in quality improvement.
“The people who got funded were all experts in informatics who have been doing this kind of instruction,” Hersh said, although none of them has ever developed curricula for community colleges.
To make up for lack of community college experience, each of the contracting universities was obliged to enlist “a suitable number of community college partners,” Hersh said. “In my center, there are four community colleges partners. There are faculty that will work with us as subject-matter experts that will come up with curricula suitable for the community college setting.”
Work on curriculum development by the five universities and their community college partners began almost immediately after the grants were awarded in early April, Hersh said.
The schools have less than four months to complete their curriculum development work before Oregon Health & Science welcomes 400 community college educators to Portland in August for a crash course in the new IT training program outlines.
“It will be a pretty intensive week late that month,” Hersh said. After that, the newly trained faculty will return home and get ready for a hoped-for influx of new IT students. By the end of September, the entire first wave of new IT students is expected to be enrolled.
The participating 70 community colleges will form five consortia, each geographically dispersed, although not every state will have a participating community college. The five consortia will each be led by one community college—Bellevue (Wash.) College; Los Rios Community College, Sacramento, Calif.; Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland; Pitt Community College, Greenville, N.C., and Tidewater Community College, Norfolk, Va. Grants awarded to these schools could total $70 million over the next two years—$36 million this year and up to $34 million the next.
At Bellevue College, administrators years ago foresaw the looming demand for health IT workers and began developing training programs to meet the industry’s needs. Patricia Dombrowski, director of the school’s life-science informatics center, said the college has graduated about 17 health IT workers a year over the past six years from its 12-month, 30-credit-hour health IT training program.
In 2008, as doldrums beset the Puget Sound IT job market, the college responded by creating a six-month program aimed at providing experienced IT workers from other industries with a background in healthcare IT. The 18-credit-hour program for these IT veterans opened this January with students to spare.
“We could have probably seated 50 or more, but we limited it to 25,” Dombrowski said.
In addition, Bellevue this summer will offer a three-month program for incumbent physician-office practice managers on IT project management and EHR support, she said. “Now we’re ready to scale up” for the HHS-funded training program, Dombrowski said.
Community colleges are not obligated to use the curricula developed by Oregon Health & Science and the other four universities, but all must focus their training programs on the six federally designated career paths. Although no single school is required to offer courses on all six job targets, each consortium must see that all six are covered within their group.
“I doubt we’ll do all six,” Dombrowski said. “We have to see a little more about the curriculum before we make a decision about that.”
Bellevue could get by with just some tweaks to its existing courses and curricula to adapt them to the federal program, Dombrowski said.
“We think we’re spot on and at the very worst, very close, but we have not seen the standard, and we’ve made some suggestions about the ONC accepting the existing curriculum,” she said. If required, “We stand ready to implement the national curricula.”
Bellevue will receive $1 million from the ONC grant to oversee its consortium, which includes seven other community colleges. Each community college, including Bellevue, will receive the same $625,000 in federal grant money to run its training programs and other services. Bellevue’s additional $375,000 will go to administer the consortium.
Beyond providing teachers and course materials, Dombrowski said, Bellevue will offer tutoring and counseling and employment services. The amount of money the ONC is providing “seems adequate to the task,” she added.
Will there be enough time to develop and disseminate the curricula, train educators and be ready for the first day of school by September?
Dombrowski thinks so.
“It’s wonderful in these tough times for people to be able to draw a direct line from training to be put to work,” she said. “The beauty of this is it’s so directly related to people who need work.”
Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA) Applauds the 74 Members of Congress’ Letter to the FCC
New York, N.Y. – Today Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA) President and CEO, Jose Marquez-Leon released the following statement in response to the May 24, 2010 letter to the Federal Communications Commission on the importance of broadband adoption and deployment over regulation.
LISTA is pleased to see 74 members of Congress join together and speak with one voice on the importance of broadband technology to transform the communities where we live and work. Broadband technology can revitalize the Hispanic community – providing access to first class schools and job training for high-paying American jobs.
Members of Congress have shown the Federal Communications Commission the importance of broadband – and the importance of focusing on policy goals before implementing net neutrality rules that threaten delay and deter broadband investment. We simply can not afford to keep high-speed Internet out of reach from the communities with schools and businesses that need to be online.
Congress has shown the Commission that there is much work to be done to bring broadband to all of America – I hope they will take the leadership to promote access and adoption with sensible policies that encourage investment, innovation, and collaboration.
Why Broadband Regulation Needs Help from Congress Washington Post
Monday, May 24, 2010; A18
JULIUS GENACHOWSKI, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, cannot win for losing.
Internet service providers (ISPs), including Comcast and AT&T, insist that a light touch is needed when regulating the Internet to guard against innovation-stifling intervention. Some public interest groups and businesses, including Google, argue that the FCC must seriously police the Internet to ensure ISPs do not discriminate against certain technologies. (Disclosure: The Washington Post Co. has interests in broadcast and cable television and businesses that depend on the Internet, all of which could be affected by FCC action or inaction.)
The debate intensified dramatically last month after a D.C. federal appeals court struck down the FCC’s relatively relaxed regulatory approach.
From Mr. Genachowski’s perspective, the ruling left the agency with a distasteful choice: Either abandon efforts to regulate broadband or reclassify the service to subject it to more muscular legal provisions typically reserved for telephone companies and other common carriers. Mr. Genachowski, in an effort at compromise, chose a third way: apply only a few of the common-carrier provisions to parts of broadband delivery.
This approach is also unacceptable. For some eight years, the agency has argued that broadband constitutes an “information service” and that it should be subject only to a light regulatory touch. To reverse course now by classifying broadband as a telecommunications service would require the agency to throw out years of its own data and analysis. While agencies have broad latitude in reevaluating regulatory schemes, reversals should be linked to significant market shifts. The facts do not support such a conclusion, and the FCC should not now try to shoehorn broadband into an existing — but incompatible — regulatory scheme.
What is needed is a fourth way: The agency, industry, consumer groups and other interested parties should work with Congress to craft clear but limited rules tailored to broadband. Advocates of increased oversight worry that the often-protracted legislative process will leave a gaping regulatory void that ISPs will exploit to engage in mischief. This is nonsense. It ignores the ISPs’ need to provide good service to keep their customers, and it does not take into account the healthy oversight provided by those consumers and Internet watchdog groups. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department also have the power to police anticompetitive or fraudulent acts.
At the moment, the FCC appears powerless to follow through with its national broadband plan, which includes the goal of expanding service to minority and poor communities. While we do not agree with much of the plan, there are worthwhile elements, including reporting, monitoring and transparency requirements, that the FCC could not enact without explicit legal authority. This is yet another reason why the agency should make a trek to Capitol Hill.
Editorial Guest Writer Rafael A. Fantauzzi, CEO, NPRC: Stop the FCC from Treating Puerto Ricans as Second Class Citizens.
Washington, DC [CapitalWirePR] May 24, 2010 – Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) treated Puerto Rico and its elected representatives with disregard and disrespect. It held that Puerto Ricans don’t deserve the same quality of access to telecommunications services that other Americans enjoy. This is wrong and this must be reversed.
Congress created the FCC for the express purpose of ensuring that “all the people of the United States” have comparable access to telecommunications services “without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.” In furtherance of this fundamental right, Congress directed the FCC to provide funding to ensure universal access to communications services. And Congress specifically required the FCC to provide the financial support necessary to ensure that equal quality telecommunications services in “insular areas,” like Puerto Rico, are both available and affordable.
The FCC, however, turned its back on this duty and the Commonwealth. The FCC decided not to provide the funding necessary to ensure Puerto Rico has equal quality universal telephone service. Instead, the Commission said that having affordable wire line telephone service isn’t important in Puerto Rico because, in the FCC’s view, we can make do with cell phone service. What the FCC did not say is that this is a double standard that discriminates against Puerto Rico because the FCC’s policies on the mainland have ensured affordable access to both wire line and wireless services.
At bottom, we have a real need for the support Congress directed the FCC to provide. Despite the advances seen in other parts of the country, many in Puerto Rico still lack access to basic telephone and Internet services. In fact, Puerto Rico has the largest population of persons who lack access to any wire line telecommunications service—a staggeringly high 200,000 individuals and approximately 200 communities. Moreover, many of these same communities lack access to wireless telecommunications due to weak coverage in the inland mountains.
Had the FCC followed Congress’s direction, Puerto Ricans would be assured of the affordable access to equal quality telecommunications they are entitled to. And we are not just talking about voice services. Before the FCC made its decision, the Puerto Rico Telephone Company offered a commitment to use these funds to deploy voice and broadband-capable infrastructure. This would not only have ensured access to wired telephone service, it would have provided a running start toward efforts to bring broadband to more of the citizens of the Commonwealth.
On the same day that the FCC turned its back on the people of Puerto Rico, it granted a substantial increase in financial support to wire line systems in Wyoming—despite the fact that Puerto Rico has seven times the population of Wyoming and 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s population is living below the poverty line. For those of us who want to ascribe a neutral, objective basis to the FCC’s decision-making, this decision simply makes no sense.
It is time to let the FCC know that it can no longer relegate Puerto Ricans to steerage while the rest of the United States goes first class. Thankfully, the fight is not over and we are not alone. Representatives in Washington—including Resident Commissioner Pedro R. Pierluisi, Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, and Representative José E. Serrano—have been working hard to urge the FCC to treat Puerto Ricans fairly, as federal law requires. The FCC’s decision to ignore these requests reveals a profound disrespect not only for those living in Puerto Rico but for these representatives as well. We must urge them to continue to fight for us and support them in the coming days as they tell the FCC to do its job and reverse its discriminatory decision.
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The author is President and CEO of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, Inc., a nonpartisan, non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to strengthen and enhance the social, political, and economic well-being of Puerto Ricans throughout the U.S and Puerto Rico, with a special focus on the most vulnerable.
CONTACT:
National Puerto Rican Coalition
202 223 3915
Note: To view this release and high resolution pictures on the web, click on the link below: http://www.capitalwirepr.com/pr_description.php?id=e324e091-3c8d-83e0-fc78-4bfa791a65be
