Sharing the Educational Wealth: A Nursing and Health Informatics Program Collaboration

With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, health information technology became identified as a strategic focus for improving patient care and lowering health care costs.¹ Health care needs are projected to require significant expansion of the informatics workforce.² A CompTIA workforce study of 1,061 global information technology (IT) managers found that the majority of organizations felt that gaps in IT skill sets significantly affected their business operations.³ Educational programs must provide the training to meet those workforce needs, covering the full range of IT expertise and skill sets required to fill those identified gaps. These programs must be able to provide hands-on training in functioning health care sites to be effective³, and must include components of data quality management, confidentiality and security, and secondary uses of clinical data and information.⁴

Securing appropriate clinical sites is a challenge for every educational program, but becomes especially difficult when the targeted clinical expertise involves access to protected health information (PHI). George Mason University’s College of Health and Human Services has developed a unique and effective approach to providing clinical experiences for health care informatics technology (HIT) students by forming a collaboration between the School of Nursing and the Health Informatics program. This collaboration was piloted in the summer of 2015, and involved three undergraduate Health Informatics students working with the data manager of the Mason and Partner (MAP) clinics.

The pilot placement of informatics interns into primary care clinics is an example of the transdisciplinary model of care that the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved advocates for optimal care to the underserved (ACU, clinicians.org). Not only were the interns taught the daily operations of a clinic system supported by federal, state, and private grant funds, they were also able to see the realities and challenges of using the data generated. They also profited when they transmitted what they had learned to others: There is no better “real world” experience for an intern than observing and teaching the other clinical students how to use an EHR system.

Mason and Partner Clinics

Since October 2013, the George Mason University School of Nursing, located in Fairfax County, Virginia, has successfully launched three academic nurse-managed health clinics in partnership with Fairfax County, Prince William County (Virginia), the local school systems, community centers, the local health department in Prince William County, and the Medical Reserve Corps in these two counties. The purpose of the MAP clinics is to provide a network of weekly health care clinics managed by nursing faculty with collaborative care provided by Mason nursing students and students from various other health-related disciplines. The clinics provide community-based health care to low-income, uninsured, immigrant, and other vulnerable populations using an interprofessional treatment team approach. The clinics have two main goals: To provide interprofessional practice sites in community-based settings for student clinical/field experiences, and to increase access to low-cost primary health care with an emphasis on education and referral to improve health care measures.

These clinics are staffed by Mason nurse practitioner (NP) faculty (primary care and behavioral health), other faculty acting in support roles (pharmacy and education), and students (graduate and undergraduate) in clinical practicums for a variety of programs, including nursing, psychology, nutrition, and social work. Each MAP clinic provides care to approximately 25 patients each day. Over the course of the 200+ days the clinics have operated, they have provided health care services to over 3,800 unique patients, ranging from newborn to age 96 years, speaking 32 languages, and encompassing all race categories.

This academic-community clinic requires unique IT setup and support. The IT setup and data management are performed by a single data manager and are designed to provide a mobile, self-contained IT solution (i.e., the computers and Internet access are transported to the site each clinic day and configured/scaled securely to support the specific services...