Gates Foundation to fund global informatics training
By Neil Versel
The American Medical Informatics Association will announce today that it has received a $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote health informatics and biomedical education and training worldwide, particularly in developing countries.
This will be the first project of a new program called 20/20, in which the International Medical Informatics Associationand its regional affiliates, including AMIA, will attempt to train20,000 informatics professionals globally by 2020. This is an outgrowthof the AMIA 10x10 program to train 10,000 people in informatics in the U.S. by 2010. IMIA will present details of 20/20 this week at the Wellcome Trust in London.
AMIAwill use the Gates Foundation money to develop "scalable" approachesto e-health education, including a replicable blueprint for traininginformatics leaders, including physicians, medical recordsprofessionals, computer scientists and medical librarians.
"Weenvision the program will train leaders in low-resource nations bylinking them and their institutions to partner institutions affiliatedwith AMIA to build capacity for managing and improving high-quality,low-cost healthcare in the less-developed economies," AMIA explains ina statement. AMIA President and CEO Don Detmer, M.D., says this elementof 20x20 is aimed at career informaticians "so there won't be a braindrain."
Other elements of 20/20 will include individual anddegree-track courses at colleges and universities—similar to existing10x10 curriculum—and skills training, not necessarily specific tomedical informatics. "We're also looking at ways of creating seminarsand executive training for people to advocate for this in their homecountries," Detmer says.
Detmer, who is retiring at the end ofthe year, says the skills training will happen in "bits and bites" tohelp build incremental capacity in the global e-health workforce. Someplanning in this area has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a $500,000 the charity gave to AMIA to lead one of the Making the eHealth Connection conferences last summer in Bellagio, Italy.
The 20/20 program is chaired by N.T. Cheung, head of IT for the Hong Kong Hospital Authority. Other confirmed or likely participating organizations include the European Federation for Medical Informatics, the Asia Pacific Organization for Medical Informatics and the Health Informatics Society of Australia.
Neil Versel is a health care journalist who writes the Healthcare IT Blog, where this post first appeared.
