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 nation’s leading organization of Latino technology professionals and the Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE), a nonprofit organization that provides broadband solutions and broadband related services to underserved and un-served communities, are excited to announce a partnership to facilitate digital empowerment initiatives.
The strategic alliance of ADE and LISTA combines the collective skills, knowledge and experience of two diverse technology-based organizations, enabling them to work together to facilitate digital advocacy, digital literacy, job creation and economic development in regards to digital empowerment initiatives. In particular, the MSI Wireless Technology Act, the Workforce Investment Act, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA), among others.
“We are forming this partnership right now because this is a pivotal time in the race to close the digital divide. Access to affordable high-speed Internet and broadband technology is a stepping stone to the opportunities of economic prosperity,” said Julius H. Hollis, Chairman of ADE. “As we focus on turning our economy around, we must make sure that those Americans currently in un-served and underserved communities are not left behind and further marginalized in this economy.”
“Both LISTA and ADE have worked hard individually to provide and enhance digital empowerment opportunities for communities of color, now as LISTA joins ADE’s Board of Directors we will combine our unique strengths and expand our reach,” said Jose Marquez, President and CEO of Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association. “This will strengthen our ability to make a difference. I am very excited to work with the ADE leadership team to further these important goals.”
Together, ADE and LISTA will pursue initiatives in order to increase Latino and African American employment opportunities within American based information sciences, telecommunication, and technology industries. The partners will target project opportunities that make technology applications available to communities of color for educational purposes, for job training and development, and to enable fuller participation in the learning, civic engagement and cultural opportunities afforded jointly or separately by ADE-LISTA utilizing online technologies.
“As part of the LISTA/ADE Partnership, we will conduct a series of surveys of African Americans and Latinos in the tech sector to measure which tech companies are leading the way in corporate responsibility relative to their Latino and African American inclusion in higher management within their company. While Latinos have made strides there are areas in the tech industry we still have little to no representation, boards, upper management and key decision making positions are still scarce at some of the most successful tech companies, we can’t ignore Latinos in high tech anymore, it is just bad business,” said Marquez.
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About Latinos in Information Science and Technology Association (LISTA) (www.a-lista.org)
Latinos in Information Science and Technology Association (LISTA) 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. LISTA Mission is to educate, motivate and encourage the use of technology in the Latino community and empowering them to bridge the digital divide.
About The Alliance for Digital Equality
The Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE), headquartered in Atlanta, GA, is a national, non-profit consumer advocacy organization that serves to facilitate and ensure equal access to technology in underserved and un-served communities. The Alliance also serves as a bridge between policymakers and minority individuals in order to help the public understand how legislative and regulatory policies regarding new technologies can impact and empower their daily lives. For more information on The Alliance for Digital Equality, please visit www.alliancefordigitalequality.org
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.
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.
Dombrowski
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.
Claire Dixon-Lee is executive director of the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education; the CAHIIM is a division of the American Health Information Management Association that accredits 281 health information management certificate and baccalaureate degree programs at schools across the country. In the past, health information management workers dealt with managing paper records, but their jobs have changed with the times.
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
Bill Hersh is a physician and chairman of the medical informatics and clinical epidemiology department at Oregon Health & Science University and a man on the hustle.
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.”
As new HIT makes ever greater inroads into the nation’s healthcare system, there is bound to be an expanding array of stories that highlight the advantages HIT brings to patients and doctors alike.
But rather than taking too much comfort as favorable evidence piles up, policymakers should regularly wonder what percentage of the population is still not reaping the benefits.
Take this story from San Francisco. For HIT proponents, it just doesn’t get much better. A single mother with a sick child on her hands uses all available hi-tech tools to get the boy’s situation diagnosed so that, much to his chagrin, he can get back to school without missing a single class.
The story goes on to describe how doctors and patients are communicating via videoconferencing, IM, e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, and the result, particularly for those patients with EHRs, is a system brimming with convenience, new efficiencies and improved care.
But here’s the question that should nag at policymakers no matter how many of these stories they read: What percentage of the population are we not reaching with all our new tools?
On the one hand, there will never be a time for a definitive answer to that question, because HIT will keep evolving and the healthcare system will have to evolve with it. On the other hand, however, policymakers should already be trying to figure out how to measure, at least roughly, who’s using HIT beyond the healthcare providers who are making the up-front investment.
For purposes of comparison, at least when it comes to patient use of HIT, they might want to take a look at how the “digitizing” of the nation’s school systems has changed or not changed the relationship between parents and teachers. With three kids in school and a veteran teacher for a wife, our admittedly unscientific hunch is that HIT runs the risk of being used much like “Edu-IT” is being used. That is, those who are plugged in general are plugged in when it comes to their children’s education. They access their grades on-line, for example, and they communicate regularly with their teachers via e-mail.
But ask a teacher, and you may well hear the lament that the parents who really need to be more engaged in their kids’ education aren’t using the latest technologies to plug in, and the chances are they won’t be any time soon.
So will the same divide develop as HIT becomes more prevalent? Obviously, there’s no way to know for sure. The question, however, should be one of the first things policymakers think of whenever they read another HIT success story.
Following the release of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan yesterday, Chairman Julius Genachowski sat down for an interview on YouTube National Broadband Plan Wrap-Up By Brad
A sampling of online chatter following yesterday’s release of the National Broadband Plan. First up, the Huffington Post:
Among the cornerstones of the plan is a ‘shoot for the moon’ goal of connecting 100 million U.S. households to 100 megabits per second broadband service over the next decade. Goals of this ambition require an unshakable policy foundation that is unequivocally supportive of investment. This means the many rule-makings that likely flow out of this plan must be cohesive in nature—pulling in the same constructive and unifying direction and staying true to the Chairman’s early and firm commitment to fact-based, data-driven decisions.
From Business Week:
If the U.S. military ranked 17th in the world, you can bet that as a nation we would make strengthening our armed forces a national priority. Yet that’s just how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world in terms of access to high-speed Internet connections. The vital communications systems that make our economy work and serve as a platform for business innovation and social interactions are second-class. Sadly, many of us have accepted that.
It’s time to overcome our broadband complacency. The national broadband plan sent to Congress on Mar. 16 by the Federal Communications Commission is critical to our economic and national security. Without a plan, we simply cannot compete.
The L.A. Times:
The FCC’s plan calls for a dramatic expansion of affordable, high-speed Internet. A chief goal is to ensure that at least 100 million homes have access to networks that allow data downloads at speeds at least 20 times faster than what most networks now deliver.
The bulk of the recommendation can be enacted by the FCC, such as diverting money from a fund for affordable phone service to rural areas to be used for increasing broadband access.
But Congress would have to act on others, particularly changing rules for federal auctions of federal airwaves to entice some broadcasters to give up their spectrum so the airwaves could be used for wireless Internet access.
USA Today:
FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn criticized the recommendation to coax, and possibly force, television broadcasters to give up some airwave spectrum. The plan aims to increase broadband competition by boosting the amount of spectrum for wireless Internet services to 500 MHz from 50 MHz.
She said that “it is certainly possible, if not likely” that the few minority-owned stations likely would be among the first to sell their spectrum. She says she would find a policy that further diminished that number to be “untenable.”
The Wall Street Journal:
The FCC report suggests that 100 million U.S. homes—of a total 112 million—should have “affordable access” to 50 megabit per second Internet service in five years. That’s about 10 times faster than most homes get today. But the plan doesn’t define affordable.
Nor does it offer a specific recipe for its aim. The FCC says it will ultimately propose dozens of new rule changes to enact some of the ideas in Tuesday’s report.
The New York Times:
The broadband proposal, which the agency sent to Congress on Tuesday, “is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues,” the agency chairman, Julius Genachowski, said in a statement.
President Obama said the plan recalled the way “past generations of Americans met the great infrastructure challenges of the day, such as building the transcontinental railroad and the Interstate highways.”
Broadband for America has released a new study on the important contributions to the U.S. economy made by private investment in communication and information technology.
The study was conducted by Robert W. Crandall and Hal J. Singer – both experts in the economics of the telecommunications industry – and shows the massive investments made in mobile and wired Internet capacity by the major network providers has created hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past six years.
The authors caution that the explosive growth in broadband access will be severely limited if “new regulatory changes undermine the incentives of broadband service providers to continue to invest.”
“Thus, the increases in broadband’s reach, penetration, capabilities, and services which we have seen over the past seven years with a minimum of government interference should be embraced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as it moves through the process of creating a National Broadband Policy.”
LISTA CEO Jose Marquez will Meet with Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and Chairman of UPS Scott Davis on how to develop more jobs in USA.
The Honorable Gary Locke U.S. Secretary of Commerce & Scott Davis Chairman & CEO UPS are in Georgia for a discussion with small businesses. They will hold a meeting with Latino and African American Business leaders to discuss President Obama’s new National Export Initiative to increase U.S. exports and support American jobs.
This special meeting will be held at the UPS Facility in Doraville Ga. on Friday February 19, 2010 @10:20 am.
During last month’s State of the Union speech, President Obama announced a goal of doubling exports over the next five years to support two million jobs in America.
Locke will detail how the Export Initiative will help the country reach that goal—providing more funding, more focus and more cabinet-level coordination to grow U.S. exports. The NEI represents the first time the United States will have a government-wide export-promotion strategy with focused attention from the president and his Cabinet.
“Increasing the export of American products and services to global markets can help revive the fortunes of U.S. companies, spur future economic growth and support jobs here at home,” Locke said. “This initiative will correct an economic blind spot that has allowed other countries to chip away at the United States’ international competitiveness.”
The National Export Initiative is focused on three key areas:
1. A more robust effort by this administration to expand its trade advocacy in all its forms, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises. This effort includes educating U.S. companies about opportunities overseas, directly connecting them with new customers and advocating more forcefully for their interests.
2. Improving access to credit with a focus on small- and medium-sized businesses that want to export.
3. Continuing the rigorous enforcement of international trade laws to help remove barriers that prevent U.S. companies from getting free and fair access to foreign markets.
In addition to improving efforts in those areas, the Export Initiative creates an Export Promotion Cabinet reporting to the president that will consist of top leaders from agencies that can contribute to this effort, including from the Commerce, State and Treasury Departments, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Small Business Administration, the Export Import Bank and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“The link between increased exports and high-quality jobs is significant enough to demand a smart, concerted effort to maximize this economic opportunity. We aren’t going to leave any jobs on the table,” said United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk. “The U.S. Trade Representative’s mission is to tear down foreign barriers to American exports and to open up new markets for U.S. goods and services. And with our partners across the government, we’ll work to ensure that job-creating export opportunities are available around the world to American businesses of every size and type.”
Within 180 days, each of the departments in the Export Cabinet will be responsible for submitting a detailed plan to the president about how it will enhance American exports. Those plans will be integrated into the strategy laid out in the NEI.
“The National Export Initiative’s coordinated effort to increase American exports will not only generate important income opportunities for farmers and ranchers, but also create off-farm jobs, furthering the Obama Administration’s work to strengthen and revitalize America’s rural communities,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said. “This renewed emphasis on trade will help America’s agricultural producers, who are the most productive in the world, further expand the United States’ agriculture trade surplus and contribute to the continued growth of our economy.”
Access to Export Financing
To improve access to credit, the president has called upon the Export-Import Bank—which provides critical financing when private banks are unwilling or unable—to increase its financing available for small- and medium-size businesses from $4 billion to $6 billion over the next year. The 2011 budget also allocates additional money to help the Export-Import Bank administer its expanded efforts.
Progress is already being made. During the last three months alone, the bank has authorized $1 billion in small business financings and added 112 new small business clients—many of whom were first-time exporters—that are selling everything from nanotechnology-based cosmetics to date palm trees to sophisticated polymers to 45 countries around the world.
And Export-Import’s increased activity will dovetail with the administration’s other credit expansion efforts, including President Obama’s recent proposal to redirect $30 billion in repaid TARP loans to boost lending to small businesses.
“In face-to-face conversations with foreign companies and government officials during the past year, I have consistently heard the same message—they want to buy high quality U.S. goods and services, and they want more American companies to sell to them. Ex-Im Bank is prepared to increase our outreach to both buyers and small- and mid-sized businesses to provide critical export financing and help us achieve the President’s goal of doubling U.S. Exports within the next five years,” said Fred P. Hochberg, chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
More Resources for Export Promotion Efforts
The president increased the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration (ITA) FY2011 budget by 20 percent to help meet the goals of the NEI. Those new resources will allow ITA to:
Bring on as many as 328 trade experts to serve as advocates for U.S. companies;
Assist more than 23,000 clients to begin or grow their export sales in 2011;
Put a special focus on increasing the number of small- and medium-sized businesses exporting to more than one market by 50 percent over the next five years;
Increase their presence in emerging high-growth markets like China, India and Brazil;
And develop a comprehensive strategy to identify market opportunities in fast-growing sectors like environmental goods and services, renewable energy, healthcare and biotechnology.
Under the NEI, the 2011 budget also allocates $54 million to enhance the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s export promotion activities. That is going to result in more technical assistance to help farmers sell specialty crops, more foreign country promotions extolling U.S. commodities, and more direct assistance helping our farmers develop new foreign markets and increase market share in existing markets.
Helping American farmers sell more simply equals more jobs. American agricultural exports totaled almost $97 billion last year, which represented nine percent of the goods the U.S. ships abroad. This activity supports about a million jobs. These jobs are both on the farm and off, in urban and rural communities, across many communities and professions.
Improving Access to Foreign Markets
The National Export Initiative directs the government to continue its efforts to remove barriers that prevent U.S. companies from getting open and fair access to foreign markets—including combating unfair tariff and non-tariff barriers and addressing practices that blatantly harm U.S. companies.
This administration will pursue trade agreements that are balanced, ambitious and improve market access for U.S. workers, firms, farmers and ranchers.
Trade starts with the understanding that it only works in a system of rules where all parties live up to their obligations. The United States is committed to a rules-based trading system where the American people—and the Congress—can feel confident that when we sign an agreement that gives foreign countries the privilege of free and fair access to our domestic market, we are going to be treated the same in their country.
The Department of Commerce, through the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee (TPCC), leads the administration’s trade promotion efforts and will help operationalize the National Export Initiative. This interagency group is chaired by the Secretary of Commerce to establish trade promotion priorities to expand trade and create jobs for Americans. The TPCC provides a platform for the Secretary of Commerce to advance a government-wide agenda on trade promotion and to directly engage the heads of other TPCC agencies. The Export Promotion Cabinet will coordinate with the TPCC.
Blacks, Latinos and Women Lose Ground at Silicon Valley Tech Companies. By Mike Swift, mswift@mercurynews.com
The unique diversity of Silicon Valley is not reflected in the region’s tech workplaces — and the disparity is only growing worse.
Hispanics and blacks made up a smaller share of the valley’s computer workers in 2008 than they did in 2000, a Mercury News review of federal data shows, even as their share grew across the nation. Women in computer-related occupations saw declines around the country, but they are an even smaller proportion of the work force here.
The trend is striking in a region where Hispanics are nearly one-quarter of the working-age population — five times their percentage of the computer work force — and when dual-career couples and female MBAs are increasingly the norm.
It is also evident in the work forces of the region’s major companies. An analysis by the Mercury News of the combined work force of 10 of the valley’s largest companies — including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay and AMD — shows that while the collective work force of those 10 companies grew by 16 percent between 1999 and 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.
The share of women at those 10 companies declined to 33 percent in 2005, from 37 percent in 1999. There was also a decline in the share of management-level jobs held by women.
“It’s just disappointing,” said Shellye Archambeau, the African-American CEO of MetricStream, a Palo Alto-based company that provides governance, risk and compliance support to global corporations such as BP and Pfizer. “The valley is a very strong place, but the fact that we are so lacking in female leadership, in African-American leadership, and frankly in Latino leadership in tech, you just sit there and say, ‘Imagine what it could be.’ ”
With the number of white computer workers also dropping after 2000, Asians were the exception. They now make up a majority of workers in computer-related occupations who live in Silicon Valley, although they hold only about one in six of the nation’s computer-related jobs.
Among the findings:
* Of the 5,907 top managers and officials in the Silicon Valley offices of the 10 large companies in 2005, 296 were black or Hispanic, a 20 percent decline from 2000, according to U.S. Department of Labor work-force data obtained by the Mercury News through a Freedom of Information request.
In 2008, the share of computer workers living in Silicon Valley who are black or Latino was 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively — shares that had declined since 2000. Nationally, blacks and Latinos were 7.1 percent and 5.3 percent of computer workers, respectively, shares that were up since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The share of managers and top officials who are female at those 10 big Silicon Valley firms slipped to 26 percent in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000.
Cisco Systems is among companies that say they are taking steps to improve diversity by forming diversity councils and employee resource groups and by tapping organizations such as the National Society of Black Engineers for job candidates. Cisco declined to released its most recent race data in detail, but said the number of black and Hispanic workers had “remained stable”
since 2005, when about 6 percent of its local work force was either black or Hispanic.
“Cisco believes an inclusive culture promotes creativity, innovation and drives collaboration,” said Ken Lotich, a company spokesman.
The reasons Silicon Valley lags the nation in hiring — and perhaps in retention — of African-Americans and Latinos are varied and complex, researchers and observers say.
A company’s commitment to diversity can waver, particularly in tough economic times, said Palo Alto venture capitalist Alberto Yépez, a former executive at Apple and Oracle. While Hewlett-Packard, for one, is consistent in its efforts, “I think companies that do not necessarily fare as well have issues, and it’s the consistency that drives” successful diversity efforts.
Other reasons, experts say, include a history of valley companies hiring well-trained tech workers from the Pacific Rim, a weak pipeline of homegrown candidates, and a hypercompetitive business environment that leaves little time to develop workers.
“This is like ‘top gun’ school for techies. Basically, that’s one difference between Silicon Valley and the other tech centers,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, Duke and Harvard who has studied the work-force dynamics of tech centers around the U.S. The intense premium on education “inherently gives Asians an advantage, because they tend to be stronger in math and science.”
But social research has shown that innovation can flower from differences.
“If everybody around the table is the same, the same ideas will tend to come up. If you have a diversity of race, gender, age, educational and different life experiences, people will attack a problem from different perspectives, and that will lead to innovation,” said Caroline Simard, research director for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. “In an industry that thrives on innovation, like high tech, it’s especially important.”
First-person account
Many minority tech workers are keenly aware of the numbers, because they live them every workday.
“I was the only African-American in every IT job I’ve ever had, ” said Derek Anderson, a 24-year valley veteran who has worked at Adobe Systems, Cisco and other companies.
Like Anderson, San Jose State University computer science student Vicente De La Cruz describes a feeling of isolation — of being “the only one.”
“I’m typically the only Latino, the only Mexican-American, in my class,” said De La Cruz, a 34-year-old with a quiet demeanor. During a recent internship at the software company SAP in Palo Alto, he saw “maybe five other Latinos on the SAP campus. I’ve learned to adjust to it. You have to get used to it; it’s a major motivation of mine to keep working in this field.”
The Mercury News originally sought federal employment data for the valley’s 15 largest companies through the Freedom of Information Act in early 2008. Following an appeals process that stretched over nearly two years, five of those companies — Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials — convinced federal officials to block public disclosure. Data from 2005 was the most current available when the Mercury News made the request.
Between 1999 and 2005, Hispanics were a declining share of the work force in a majority of the 10 large Silicon Valley companies analyzed by the Mercury News — slipping to 5.2 percent of all workers at the 10 companies in 2005, from 6.8 percent in 1999. The black share of the work force at the 10 companies dropped to 2.1 percent, from 2.9 percent.
Even an organization as elite as Stanford’s computer science department felt the need to revamp its curriculum this year, amid concerns that declining overall enrollment was causing the number of women, blacks and Latinos to dwindle even more.
As computer science enrollment dropped, “the percentage of women declined more than the overall percentage,” said Mehran Sahami, a professor who led the curriculum reform. For the few women and minorities left, “suddenly it feels much more isolated” — yet another deterrent.
Women’s prospects
Despite a few high-profile figures like Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Google search chief Marissa Mayer, labor department and other data suggest women are climbing the corporate ladder in Silicon Valley at a slower rate than men.
Over a recent lunch at the Women’s Community Center at Stanford, gender researchers Simard and Andrea Henderson were recounting some gloomy statistics for a room of female computer science students.
In Silicon Valley companies, men and women in technical careers are equally likely to hold mid-level jobs, but men are 2.7 times more likely than women to be promoted to a high-ranking tech jobs such as vice president of engineering, or senior engineering manager, Simard and Henderson found in a 2009 study.
The researchers found a series of clues from the water cooler to the living room. Men are more likely to develop informal professional networks, like taking coffee breaks with colleagues — networks that often lead to career opportunities.
The valley’s married male tech employees are more likely to follow the traditional model of having a man working full time, with a woman who stays home with the kids, than are male professionals nationally, perhaps because of the high salaries paid in tech. By contrast, tech women are overwhelmingly in dual-career couples, and many face an either-or choice — parenthood or career advancement.
“We expected a difference,” Simard told the glum-looking students at Stanford, “but this is kind of like the 1950s.”
Still work ahead
Simard and other researchers are convinced that valley companies do value diversity.
Take eBay, for example. While the San Jose company declined to make its executives available for an interview, or to share its most up-to-date employment information, eBay said it believes workplace diversity is crucial.
But the numbers don’t reflect that.
As eBay’s local work force swelled to accommodate the online retailer’s growth between 2000 and 2005, eBay added 366 managers to its Silicon Valley offices. That net increase included just five additional black managers and no Hispanics.
At a time when eBay was headed by one of the few high-profile female CEOs in Silicon Valley, Meg Whitman, the share of the company’s managers and top officials who were female declined to 30 percent in 2005, from 36 percent five years earlier, according to federal employment data.
“No global company today can stay competitive without persistently recruiting, retaining and developing a diverse work force “… eBay believes workforce diversity is critical to achieving our growth objectives and serving our millions of customers globally,” the company said in a statement.
Some critics blame the government for allowing powerful Silicon Valley companies to rely so heavily on foreign-born workers on H-1B visas, which they contend has boosted the numbers of Asians in the tech workforce at the expense of other groups.
“The reason Silicon Valley is different is that those standards have traditionally been enforced in other industries,” said John Templeton, whose “Silicon Ceiling” report details the lack of blacks and Latinos in Silicon Valley. “If you go to a bank IT department, or a cable television IT department, it reflects the community around it. But somewhere, government dropped the ball.”
Others point to the public education system, noting that recent achievement test scores for black and Latino students have been even lower in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties than for the state overall.
“It certainly is a self-reinforcing cycle,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the school of information at UC-Berkeley.
Aristotle Saunders, a 32-year-old Marvell engineer, volunteers with school kids in Oakland, dissecting iPods to interest them in a tech career. He thinks the lack of visible middle-class minority neighborhoods in Silicon Valley makes it even tougher to recruit minorities to tech jobs here.
“I sort of have that chameleon feel where I can fit in anywhere, but I can see where people raised in a black neighborhood would feel really uncomfortable,” said Saunders, whose parents are African-American and Filipino and who grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in Southern California. “Even though Silicon Valley is based on a principle of meritocracy, where they value people based on their skills rather than their class or ethnic background, I think it’s still a challenge.”
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/swiftstories.
Today, Latinos in Information Science and Technology Association (LISTA), the nation’s leading organization of Latino technology professionals and the Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE), a nonprofit organization that provides broadband solutions and broadband related services to underserved and un-served communities, are excited to announce a partnership to facilitate digital empowerment initiatives.
