The Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) will be hosting an informational webinar that features speakers from ONC and grantee communities providing an update on the Workforce Training Program for Health IT Professionals.

New health IT training programs are now available to help health care workers and others stay current in the changing health care environment and deliver care more effectively. These new sessions include online and face-to-face formats, and are customized to address specific health IT skills needed by physicians, nurses, care coordinators, health IT specialists and other healthcare workers.

At the end of the Workforce Training Program webinar, participants will be able to: 
• Understand the history and accomplishments of the Workforce Training Program 
• Identify how to access current and updated instructional materials to help healthcare workers excel in new environments 
• Recognize the value of the new components added to the Workforce Training Program 

The September webinar entitled “Linking & Merging Data Sources” will discuss merging Substance Use Disorder (SUD) related data sources with other state databases. Specifically, it will discuss how using  different data sources can provide additional insight on a patient’s  continuum of care when services are paid for by Medicaid and other state agencies. There will be three featured state partners on the webinar panel to discuss their efforts to actively link or merge data and field your questions. 

On this webinar:

• Connecticut will discuss how it is using distributed data networks to answer questions about their SUD population demographics, care outcomes and costs;
• Washington will discuss how it has designed meaningful measurement concepts that enable policy analyses, program evaluations, predictive modeling and performance management; and
• Oregon will share how it developed a system to combine SUD  block grant  data with  Medicaid claims data to analyze treatment outcomes  and share information with providers. 

During this webinar, presenters will discuss discuss safe use of electronic health record (EHR) systems, specifically, methods to evaluate the safety of computer provider order entry (CPOE) functionality. Presenters will describe updates to a CPOE evaluation tool that assesses safety-critical decision support alerts and discuss methods to identify ‘wrong-patient’ errors when ordering medications and tests. 

Learning Objectives:
At the conclusion of this Webinar, participants should be able to: 

1. Discuss the use of a CPOE evaluation tool to self-assess an inpatient EHR system for safety performance and planned refinements that aim to improve the tool.
2. Describe the potential risk of providers placing orders in the wrong patient’s record when multiple patient records are open at once in an EHR system.

Presenters include:

• David Classen, M.D., M.S., Chief Medical Information Officer for Pascal Metrics and Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Utah
• Jason Adelman, M.D., M.S., Chief Patient Safety Officer & Associate Chief Quality Officer, Columbia University

Moderator:

• Ed Lomotan, M.D., Medical Officer and Chief of Clinical Informatics, Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Target Audience: Health care researchers, physicians, physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care professionals

The following resource provides links to organizations that include job postings for Health IT and Quality jobs. This may be helpful to those both seeking employment or simply looking to learn more about the field and the kinds of positions that are available. 

Oregon Health & Science University will be offering a free 18-hour online course to healthcare professionals interested in expanding their knowledge of healthcare analytics and health information technology.