Emphasis on ‘national’ in National Center for Informatics in Butte

Pat Dudley and Ray Rogers, who eventually will be the directors of the National Center for Informatics in Butte, are not thinking small. They believe the center could become a national reference and research center, drawing on the knowledge bases of Montana Tech and St. James Healthcare as well as professionals in the information systems industry, Dudley and Rogers said.

By Vikki McLaughlin for inBusiness

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Health care today is driven more and more by technology, said Dudley, director of human resources for the hospital. "We have to keep up with that."

For graduates of the informatics degree program, the continuing education component of the national center is crucial, Dudley said. "The key to functioning in the IT (information technology) world is to be kept up to date, and continually be updated," Dudley said.

"We also have a huge need for continuing education in health care in general," Dudley said. The center would have the infrastructure to provide that education through distance learning, especially to small, rural facilities with small budgets.

A recent article in "Nurse Week" discussed the need for technology in health care, and how the industry is lagging behind in that area, Dudley said. In a survey in "Business and Health" magazine of IT specialists in hospital systems, HMOs and physician group practices, nearly two-thirds of those responding said their organizations’ top priority for 2001 was the need to deploy Internet technologies. The top five priorities listed by the respondents had an information-technology component.

The informatics program has benefits for Tech, for St. James, for Butte, for Montana and for the country, said Dudley, who was the instigator of the project. What started out as an idea to solve the hospital’s shortage of on-call, or per diem, workers, blossomed into plans for the degree program and the national center. Dudley’s original plan was to offer scholarships to Tech for health care workers that were burned out and wanted a new career. That would be good for St. James, as those students would work in the per diem pool for the two or three years they were attending the college.
As his plan took shape, the idea of merging clinical skills and information systems skills began forming in Dudley’s mind. By the time he took the idea to Rogers, director of college relations and marketing at Tech, in the fall of 2000, the birth of the informatics program was on the way.

Classes offered at Tech

While the first two years of informatics classes will be delivered mostly online, the other classes in the informatics curriculum, such as psychology and chemistry, are already offered at Tech through other departments.
Tech offers degree programs in health care, technology and communications fields, Rogers said. "We can pull from the courses we already have toward a health care informatics degree," he said.

Rogers said, however, that he wants to bring in more experts in informatics to help Danette Melvin, the interim department head for informatics, with the program, and hopes to have five faculty members in the program within the first few years.
Students may be straight out of high school, or health care professionals seeking a career. Students may exit the program after two years with an associate degree, or continue for four years and a bachelor of science degree. The program will be housed in Tech’s College of Math and Sciences.

Melvin, who has taught four online courses, said that, in taking the classes online, students will actually be using the technology they’re studying. When they’re in their senior year, students will do practicums in the "real world," Dudley said. Both Tech and the center will help find internship programs for students, both during their senior year and during summers.
Students will also be placed in various health care sites so they can see what a particular job is like, Melvin said. During the Health Care Delivery course in their junior year, a student might be placed with a nursing home director for a time, to see what that job entails, or in a clinic or other facility where they will learn about different health care professions, and research different environments.

"I think it really will make our program," Melvin said. "There’s no others in the business of showing students what everyone else does."
"There’s a huge spectrum of job opportunities for graduates that have knowledge of other aspects of the industry," Rogers said.

Rogers said the program could have as many as 150 students within three years. But he doesn’t want to proceed to too fast, to ensure the quality remains high.
"It’s an incredibly exciting program," Rogers said. "The interest from the health care industry has been really exciting for us. The jobs are out there, and they’re good paying jobs. We’re hitting this at a good time. The industry needs these people and they need them yesterday."

"Right now," Dudley said, "we’re the best thing around."

By Vikki McLaughlin for inBusiness

http://www.mtstandard.com/inbus1/5-ib6.html

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Informatics degree program, National Center move forward

The path for the National Center for Health Care Informatics may be changing slightly, but the project is moving forward all the same.

St. James Healthcare and Montana Tech, joint authors of the project to build the National Center in Butte, are waiting for a $1.5 million in federal funds to come through. They’re hoping they’ll get it by early 2003. In the meantime, however, the two partners plan to use $400,000 from another grant – they hope to get this fall – to renovate two rooms on the Tech campus as a classroom and temporary office space for the center.

"We decided to do this so we could get started, and not wait until we have money for the entire center," said Pat Dudley, director of human resources for St. James.

The National Center will ultimately be built on the St. James campus, paired with a new degree program at Tech in Health Care Informatics. Graduates of the program, which began this fall, will enter a specialty career that merges clinical health care and information technology. A graduate of the program will be able to retrieve and interpret data, track trends and costs and other information useful to hospitals and other health care facilities. These graduates will speed the process of bringing the health care industry up to date in the world of technology.
"The bottom line is, it will improve health care – improve both the quality and efficiency," said Ray Rogers, director of college relations and marketing for Montana Tech.

"In time," said Dudley, "it will have an impact on the cost of health care, which is important to everyone."

The center will cover about 8,000 to 10,000 square feet, and house three classrooms with multimedia capabilities, as well as administrative offices. It will be a nonprofit corporation – a self-supporting, standalone entity – with affiliations to both Tech and St. James. While the two supporting entities will not provide any funding for the center, they will provide expertise, knowledge and professional skills for students and faculty to draw on.

The $400,000 funding was awarded to the center in April, but because of a bureaucratic glitch, the money was placed in a restricted category that did not allow it to be used for planning and design costs.

Dudley and Rogers, co-leaders on the informatics project, decided to redefine the grant request so the money could be used for construction and equipment costs for the renovation of the Tech rooms. Although the money has been appropriated, the recipients must still go through a grant application process before they get the money, Dudley said – he’s hoping by the end of September.

When the money arrives, Rogers said, work will begin on remodeling one room in the basement of the Chemistry Building at Tech and a room on the second floor. Rogers said the two rooms – each about 850 square
feet – were left unfinished when the building was renovated several years ago because funds ran out.

The basement room will be converted to a multimedia classroom with 24 computer work stations – which are the specifications planned for the same classroom at the center. The second floor room, which is near faculty offices, will be office space for the center and the HCI faculty, Rogers said.
The classroom will be suited for HCI classes as well as some other classes, Rogers said. It will also be used to demonstrate a new technology funded through another grant at Tech, he said. In that project, David Hobbs, associate professor of chemistry, will access a new super-fast network that can bring voice and video over the Internet.

For example, Rogers said, on the classroom wall would be several TV screens, and people from various locations could be seen on them. And, those people and those in the classroom would be able to see and hear each other through the Access Grid, he said.
"If we can demonstrate that technology successfully," Rogers said, he’d like to use it to provide training and other services for health care providers in rural areas. As an access grid node, Tech – and the Informatics program – could link doctors and other health care providers and bring them together in virtual meetings, he said.

When the National Center is built, the office equipment and staff will move to that building, Dudley said. As for the classroom, Dudley said it would be evaluated at that point whether it should be moved to the center or left at Tech.

Classes begin

In the meantime, Tech’s Danette Melvin, the interim department head for informatics, started teaching two Health Care Informatics this fall to 29 students, Rogers said.
The informatics degree program, which was approved last November by the state Board of Regents, is the first such undergraduate program in the United States, Rogers said. There are master’s and doctorate programs available, but none for undergraduates.

Rogers was happy with the number of students enrolled for the first classes, especially since the college had such limited time to advertise and market the new degree program.
"We had hoped for 25 new students, so 29 is a really successful start to our new program," Rogers said. "It’s pretty exciting."
Both classes are taught online, in keeping with Rogers’ plan to offer the first two years of classes over the Web, then the final two years of the four-year program on the campus. The students beginning the program this fall come from a variety of places, mostly in the region of Montana, Idaho and Washington, and include some freshmen, some transfers and some Tech students who decided to switch majors, Rogers said.

Waiting for funding

Dudley and Rogers said they should know about the $1.5 million request, which has the support of all three of the state’s congressional representatives – Sens. Conrad Burns and Max Baucus and Rep. Denny Rehberg – by November. They plan to make another funding request for the third and final year to finish the center.

"We hope by the end of the third appropriation year, that it will be able to sustain itself," Rogers said.
As part of the planning process for the informatics program and center, Dudley said he is contacting Baucus’ office to ask for help in setting up a forum of health providers from around the state.

"We want to find out what they want, what they would like to see this program accomplish," Dudley said.
He wants to make sure the program turns out graduates that have the skills the health care profession – including those providing rural health care and mental health care – needs and wants, and not find out three years down the road that they’re not learning what they need.

By Vikki McLaughlin for inBusiness

http://www.mtstandard.com/inbus1/55-ib6.html

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Goals of the National Center for Informatics

The goals of the National Center for Informatics, as its authors wrote in the funding request submitted to Congress this year, are:

To establish a national reference and network center for health care professionals practicing in the area of information technology;

To establish a continuing education resource to provide distance learning opportunities for professionals working in rural and urban health care facilities;

To establish a business incubator to encourage and support information technology developing products to manage health care information. The incubator would have the added benefit of encouraging economic growth in Montana;

To establish a corporate sponsorship program to develop internship and permanent employment opportunities for graduates;

To provide educational programs designed to retain qualified health care professionals through a workforce transition program; and

To provide highly trained, skilled interns and graduates to hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, managed care organizations, insurance organizations and software vendors across America to bridge the growing technology gap between clinical and information systems professionals.

By the inbusiness staff

http://www.mtstandard.com/inbus1/66-ib6.html