Investing in the Informatics Workforce: Strategy of the Future

The impending shortages in the public health workforce have been well documented as have the gaps in informatics capacity across all levels of public health.  The CDC NCPHI External Workforce Development Program is a new endeavor designed to develop multi-pronged approaches to increase public health informatics capacity at the federal, state, and local levels.  This Program’s projects are aligned to focus on:

• Developing an informatics workforce pipeline through colleges and universities;
  
• Educating the existing public health workforce in core informatics competencies through a variety of mechanisms; and,
  
• Increasing the number of public health informaticians working in state and local public health.
  

In addition to providing the Program’s strategic overview, a review of the first year’s accomplishments and challenges will be presented.  These projects include the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 10x10 tutorial, the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) core curriculum project, and PHIN conference tutorials.
NCPHI has in place two cooperative agreements of varying timeframes and scopes with partners such as AMIA and PHII to increase the public health informatics workforce capacity.  This task is accomplished through involvement with the AMIA 10x10 Program which aims to train 10,000 professionals by 2010.  NCPHI’s work with PHII includes workforce development activities with stakeholders and curriculum framework and development.  Over-arching the External Workforce Development Project’s work with external partners, is its variety of internal endeavors to establish a baseline for the Program in an effort to inform future activities and direction.
The discussion of these projects will delve into the Program’s strategic plan for maturation as well as the projects of focus including the institutions, organizations and partners who are working with NCPHI to increase public health informatics capacity across the nation.