HI-FIVE (Health Informatics For Innovation, Value, and Enrichment)

Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics has launched the free online HI-FIVE (Health Informatics For Innovation, Value & Enrichment) professional development training program. With federal funding from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the team has developed a unique training to serve the professional development needs of healthcare workers facing a rapidly changing industry.

One of seven grant recipients nationally, Columbia University created new training materials and a program to train 1,000 healthcare workers for free. In addition, the seven recipient institutions updated training materials from the original Workforce Curriculum Development program funded under the HITECH Act. In a highly collaborative effort led by DBMI’s Dr. Rita Kukafka and Raven David, a team of Subject Matter Experts from DBMI, NewYork-Presbyterian, and the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning joined forces to identify training needs, develop content and curricula, and bring these materials to the public.

Workforce training needs were identified through a series of qualitative interviews with experts in the New York metro area from organizations such as the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH), and the New York City Department of Health (NYCDOH). Transcript analysis elucidated numerous recurring themes and overlapping “priority” training areas. Armed with this information, Kukafka and her team developed role-tailored curricula covering the subject areas of Population Health, Care Coordination and Interoperability, Value-Based Care, Healthcare Data Analytics, and Patient-Centered Care.

To meet the needs of busy professionals, Kukafka’s team designed three comprehensive courses in the online platform Coursera, each intended for completion in less than 12 hours. Each course is geared for a different subset of the healthcare workforce, covering different perspectives.

A hallmark of this training is its unique, case-based format to improve trainee engagement and facilitate relation of content to real-life applications. The triad of courses follows the fictional patient Mr. Osner Santana as he navigates several healthcare settings and interacts with an array of providers. Trainees put themselves in the shoes of these individuals and are faced with interactive “decision points” which mimic the choices one might face in a given situation.

The HI-FIVE program welcomed its first cohort of trainees for its first course in November 2016. The other two courses are scheduled to launch in early 2017.

DBMI Chair Dr. George Hripcsak says, “This is an exciting time in healthcare, and the HI-FIVE training captures the essence of what healthcare professionals need to know in health IT. Dr. Kukafka and her team have drawn upon three decades of DBMI experience and external expertise, and they have succeeded in making this material accessible to many. The potential impact of this training is immeasurable.”