A new program has emerged to help physicians make better use of the massive flow of health information they encounter on a day-to-day basis. With any luck, it will not only improve the skills of individual doctors but also seed institutions with clinicians who understand health IT in the practice of medicine.
The Indiana Training Program in Public and Population Health Informatics, which is supported by a five-year, $2.5 million award from the National Library of Medicine, focuses on public and population health issues. Launched in July 2017, it will support up to eight fellows annually.
The program is sponsored by Indiana University School of Medicine Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the Regenstrief Institute. Regenstrief, which is dedicated to healthcare quality improvement, supports healthcare research and works to bring scientific discoveries to bear on real-world problems.
For example, Regenstrief participates in the Healthcare Services Platform Consortium, which is addressing interoperability issues. There’s also the Regenstrief EHR Clinical Learning Platform, an AMA-backed program training medical student to cope with misidentified patient data, learn how different EHRs work and determine how to use them to coordinate care.
The Public and Population Health training, for its part, focuses on improving population health using advanced analytics, addressing public health problems such as opioid addiction, obesity and diabetes epidemics using health IT and supporting the implementation of ACOs.
According to Regenstrief, fellows who are accepted into the program will learn how to manage and analyze large data sets in healthcare public health organizations; use analytical methods to address population health management; translate basic and clinical research findings for use in population-based settings; creating health IT programs and tools for managing PHI; and using social and behavioral science approaches to solve PHI management problems.
Of course, training eight fellows per year is just a tiny drop in the bucket. Virtually all healthcare institutions need senior physician leaders to have some grasp of healthcare informatics or at least be capable of understanding data issues. Without having top clinical leaders who understand informatics principles, health data projects could end up at a standstill.
In addition, health systems need to train front-line IT staffers to better understand clinical issues — or hire them if necessary. That being said, finding healthcare data specialists is tricky at best, especially if you’re hoping to hire clinicians with this skill set.
Ultimately, it’s likely that health systems will need to train their own internal experts to lead health IT projects, ideally clinicians who have an aptitude for the subject. To do that, perhaps they can use the Regenstrief approach as a model.