Informatics Professor: Access to Health IT and Data Science Curricular Resources

Over the last decade, I have had the fortunate opportunity to be involved in two efforts to develop widely available curricular resources in health information technology and data science. While these resources are a great foundation for others to use to develop courses and other content in this area, the fact that they were developed with federal grants whose funding has now ended means that they will no longer be updated at their source. They will fortunately continue to be freely available on Web sites, but further development, at least from the source, will not occur for now.

Some might ask, why can’t you update the materials? Updating would be feasible if the materials were just simple textual resources or slides. But these materials contain much more, including narrated lectures, transcripts of those lectures, and packaging that makes them flexible to use. And even if we did just aim to simply update the content, I know from other teaching I do that it takes time and effort, not only the time of content authors, but also of instructional designers, technical support staff, and others who create useful products and packaging.

Nonetheless, the materials themselves will continue to be available, and I will use the rest of this posting to describe what material is available, some history on its development, and where the most recent versions can be found.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) Curriculum was developed initially under funding from the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Recognizing that adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) would require training a workforce to implement them, the ONC funded a workforce development program that included not only this curriculum development, but also funding for training in both community colleges and universities. The final version of the initial curriculum, completed in 2013, was posted on the Web site of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA).

In 2015, the ONC found additional funding to update the curriculum and add some new content around health IT and value-based care. The funding also included the development of short training courses, such as the Healthcare Data Analytics course that we have since developed into a standalone course that offers continuing education credit for physicians and nurses. The final curriculum itself is now available for downloading from the ONC Web site.

It should be noted that while these materials are freely available to anyone, the audience for them is focused on educators. The curriculum consists, in ONC jargon, of components, each comparable in quantity to a college-level course. In other words, the curriculum is an extensive resource that can be enhanced by those who develop and maintain courses. Self-directed learners can certainly make use of the materials, and are not discouraged from doing so, but their volume and breadth would make it challenging to design an appropriate course of study. But an experienced education should be able to adapt them appropriately.

The second resource that was developed, but for which funding has ended as well, is the OHSU Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Open Educational Resources (OERs) Project. The development of these materials was funded under a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) BD2K Program. Like the ONC curriculum, these materials are freely available for others to use and enhance. They can be viewed on the project Web site or downloaded as source materials from a GitHub repository. While they are not quite as exhaustive as the ONC components, these modules are more manageable for self-directed learners. The Web site for these materials provides a number of examples of their use, including their being mapped to the biomedical informatics competencies of the NIH Clinical And Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program.

One limitation to both sets of these materials is that they are not able to incorporate any copyrighted material from any other source. While those of us who teach in universities that subscribe to journals and other resources are able to use portions of such content, password-protected in learning management systems, under fair use rules, putting copyrighted material out in the public domain is not allowed. This is another role of the educator or other content expert, to make appropriate use of copyrighted matter.

The components of the ONC Health IT Curriculum consist of the following: