Joseph Wu has not even left college yet, but he's already graduated from the ONC-funded Community College Consortia for health IT.
Wu, currently a student at the Sloan Program in Health Administration at Cornell University, took part in the ONC courses to broaden his exposure to various facets of healthcare. Spending the summer working at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wu said he is glad to have been exposed to some of the topics covered in the classes, including project management cycle, RFPs, Gantt charts, implementation plans and client/vendor buy-in, among others.
[Related: Graduates stream out of community college health IT programs.]
No stranger to health IT, Wu blogs as Healthcare Capitalist and tweets @hc_capitalist with a focus on technology, finance, and policy of healthcare. Government Health IT Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Wu about his experience in the community college program as he was preparing to graduate in late June.
Q: ONC described the courses as geared toward IT or healthcare professionals in that IT pros learn about healthcare while healthcare pros focus on IT. Was that your experience?
A: We hit the ground running on implementation of meaningful use projects. I do believe that is the case. I think that after we graduate we will work very well under those project teams. In the class, we broke into teams where we worked on a project plan to collect requirements for meaningful use. One of the tasks was to implement health IT across the entire health system.
CMS held a call to help providers understand the requirements and at the end when they opened it to questions, I either knew the answers or knew how to find the answers. Within the team we worked tightly together for a couple months, and actually talked about starting a side consulting team on our own to help put the RECs in motion. I think we’re ultimately confident about doing projects where meaningful use is involved.
Q: So meaningful use is what you are most prepared to do upon graduation?
A: The most appropriate work we will be doing is either as consultants or as staff helping the client or the hospital decide whether they should go for meaningful use and what they need to do to meet certain criteria. Another thing is we can help with the vendor selection for EHRs.
Q: Since you’re in an early wave of graduates. How could ONC improve this program?
A: ONC covered $10,000 out of the $12,500, so I still had to come up with about $2,500 on my own. Another minor suggestion is to try and improve the way the graduates can retain a professional degree because my program, it’s not really a certification, it’s kind of like a training program. Some certification lasts several years and right now I’m not sure how long the program will help with my professional development. Another thing is, I think they can make a closer connection between the program and the Regional Extension Centers. It’s already pretty good. We had teachers come in from one of the RECs in the area but I think there should be a closer tie, somehow, either in terms of real project exposure or work opportunities.
Q: So it sounds like you might be headed into a career as a consultant?
A: For myself, that’s the area I want to explore right now because I’ll get exposed to a lot of different types of products, and that’s really what draws me to that role. I’m interested in the implementation side. I can be a consultant where I work in a lot of different hospitals, or if I decide not to do that I can go to work for one health system.
Q: Do you have any sense of how many of your classmates are thinking of working as consultants, versus how many might be looking to that one health system, or elsewhere?
A: Not only do they come from different backgrounds, but everyone has different aspirations. That’s one of the things about the program that I really like: I know, two to five years out, I’ll be able to keep in touch with people and they’ll all be in different areas. I have one more year of school left, so I want to explore the consulting side. But other people from the program will go into working for individual hospitals to help them implement and attest to meaningful use. Based on my knowledge no one on my six-person team is coming from the vendor side but I do believe that some of the students will be recruited by and hired into the vendors like eClinicalWorks and McKesson, companies like that. A few people are interested in working in the public sector, a few might try to work for the RECs. It seemed they were very understaffed for the amount of projects they were doing. And some students were interested in the policy side, either here in New York or going to D.C.
Q: ONC projected a shortage of 50,000 health IT workers, so if a large chunk of students become consultants or work for vendors do they count toward filling that 50,000-worker hole?
A: They did not really recommend or explicitly push us to go in any specific direction. The speakers represent the kind of people we might be working with or working for in the future, and they came more from the provider side. Actually, one of our professors came from the vendor side, Allscripts, but we’ve had doctors, CIOs, directors from the REC.
Q: In the program, was there much focus on pure-IT trends, so things like, say, cloud computing?
A: There wasn’t a specific chapter called cloud computing, but it was integrated into various aspects of the program. There was a project with PracticeFusion, in which we had to think about the needs and issues around cloud computing. And we talked about issues like backup, and criteria issues. Every class, they brought in recent news, a lot of them from Healthcare IT News, actually.
