TCC offering gives students an edge in expanding field

VIRGINIA BEACH

In these times when good jobs are coveted, Tidewater Community College will graduate a wave of students this week who are pioneers in an emerging field.

Electronic medical records is an industry growing so quickly there will be a shortfall of 50,000 health information technology workers in the next five years, reports Wanted Analytics.

Larry Davenport did his homework. The Chesapeake resident, who is retired from the Navy, lost his job as an operations manager when the company he worked for left the area. He researched careers that would benefit from the federal economic stimulus and honed in on the mandate to move doctors and hospitals toward electronic health records by 2015.

"I was in warehouse management where doors are closing every day," said Davenport, 52. "This happens to be more of a career of the future versus something that's going away."

Davenport will graduate from TCC's inaugural HIT program, among the first of its kind in the nation. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the college a $16 million grant last spring to head a national consortium to educate up to 7,500 information technology professionals in health care in a 12-state region over a two-year period.

More than 350 applied to the TCC program, which offered free classes over a six-month period. One hundred twenty were accepted, and 90 will graduate - a number that is on target, said program director Gretchen LeFever.

"That's a good attrition rate for any adult education program," said LeFever, who acknowledges some glitches but is pleased with the overall development of the program. Several students have been offered jobs prior to finishing.

Monique Washington of York County is among them. Washington had worked in retailing because she was unable to find a job after graduating last spring with a degree in health services administration from James Madison University. She is in her first month as an information technology services business analyst for Amerigroup.

"Having the program on my resume definitely made me more competitive," she said. "The first thing they asked me about during my interview was the program."

Not everyone is happy with the classes themselves - offered twice weekly, four hours apiece.

Some students lament the lack of an overall syllabus, say too much of the material is repetitive and yearn for actual hands-on training. Computer issues at the Virginia Beach Advanced Technology Center have been another setback.

Nancy Neal, an information specialist for the city of Chesapeake, is disturbed by what she calls "busywork" with no eye toward practical preparation. Davenport agreed the program lacks structure at times, but noted the volume of material covered - two years' worth - in six months. Students are expected to do extensive reading beyond the classroom to keep up with the accelerated pace.

"We're getting it more with a syringe than through PowerPoints," Davenport said.

LeFever said the most important tool students leave with is a skill set that allows them to make a full analysis of everything needed to be done to transfer records from paper to an electronic system.

The skills the program teaches - project management, leadership and customer relations - can be applied to multiple career paths, she said.

Colin Konschak, managing partner at Divurgent, has already hired two of the students. He is impressed with the quality of students in the program, noting, "It provides a great immersion to all the things we do as consultants."

The program already has been tweaked for the next group, consolidated into two tracks: Health IT engineering and Health IT consulting. Students must have some health care or IT training prior to acceptance. Classes remain free, and the second set of graduates will receive up to 14 hours of college credit.

Many of the computer glitches that stem from antiquated software will be solved for the second class, LeFever said.

"We have purchased an additional software for electronic health records that is cleaner, so we won't have students having to deal with those issues," she said.

Washington is accepting of the bumps that come along with being the guinea pigs in an inaugural program. She enjoyed the case studies the class reviewed and the brief time spent working with actual electronic records more than the sometimes vague material on leadership and customer relations skills.

"It's a free program, and maybe if I were paying for it, it would be a whole different story," she said. "But I have a job. It definitely helped, having this on my resume."

Vicki Friedman, (757) 222-5218, vicki.friedman@pilotonline.com