Anyone who has patronized a physician’s office or hospital waiting room has experienced the problem: Over subsequent visits to different health care providers, patients are asked, again and again, to complete a new medical history, which can lead to delays, inaccurate or missing data, and compromised patient care.
Now, thanks to a collaborative research effort at Johns Hopkins, that scenario may be about to change. Earlier this year—after an initial $1.8 million federal grant was awarded to the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing—the Carey Business School joined research and instructional forces with the schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health to develop new curricula in the field of health information technology. The team is working specifically on secure, “interoperable” electronic health record systems, which can be easily updated and verified, are transportable, and can be shared almost instantaneously among multiple providers.
The award, from the Department of Health and Human Services, seeks to expand the number of highly skilled health care professionals directly working with implementing information technology, especially in the field of electronic health record systems. Along with four other grant awardees including Columbia and Duke universities, the University of Alabama-Birmingham, and the Oregon Health and Sciences University, the Johns Hopkins team is charged with developing a total of 20 courses in IT health care management and delivery for instruction by as many as 70 community colleges.
“Targeting community colleges as a delivery source allows us to extend our outreach to rural as well as urban communities, areas with fewer practices and smaller hospitals that might otherwise not be as readily exposed to these advances in IT-based record systems and data gathering and compilation,” says William Agresti, a professor at the Carey Business School with expertise in information systems and large-scale project management.
The timing is propitious, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the demand for highly qualified health IT professionals to outstrip supply by 50,000 over the next several years.
Agresti and Richard Milter, a fellow Carey Business School professor, whose expertise is in the areas of management education and collaborative learning, are helping to lead two of the Johns Hopkins teams developing curricula, while faculty member John Baker, with a background in information systems, digital forensics, and information security, is playing a key role in gaining community college support for the initiative.
“It’s an outstanding example of collaboration between our faculty and the Hopkins community in total, in delivering research-based curricula that target an urgent need,” says Agresti.
