Information Technology Professionals in Health Care: Community College Consortia to Educate Health Information Technology Professionals

The purpose of this expansion supplement is to create learning resources for use by community colleges, and other institutes of higher education offering health informatics education programs that support the criteria described above. Funding will be made available under this grant opportunity to expand one Community College Consortia to Educate Health Information Technology Professionals cooperative agreement to include the development of:● Higher education learning resources on Meaningful Use criteria, team based care, patient-centered medical home, continuous quality improvement, and the use of data to support a transformed system using technologies such as simulation, distance learning and virtual worlds ● Higher education learning resources on team based care and continuous quality improvement programs that help students operate effectively as part of an inter-disciplinary team assisting providers in the health care environment● Virtual resources that support built in milestones of knowledge acquisition and provide opportunities for either remediation or assessment, with the goal of the assessments to gauge the learner’s ability to synthesize and apply what they have learned in a contextual, real world setting. The goal is to ensure the learning resources are effective and provide the requisite training for students to function in a health care environment and also test critical thinking in real life scenarios.The competencies to be attained by persons using these training resources allow them to function in a complex healthcare environment and use Health IT optimally to support high quality, safe and effective patient care. The learning resources developed through this funding will serve as a model for future development of such resources. Material developed through this funding will be made publicly available at the end of the project period.