TIGER Initiative Launches Foundation
10-year vision mapped out during TIGER Phase I Symposium in 2006Virtual Learning EnvironmentNow, five years later, these many volunteer hours and efforts have helped advance the TIGER cause to where it is now, a formalized organization with a newly designed website with all the published best practices from the collaborative teams. What’s to come is a highly anticipated Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which will be a dynamic online environment with tools like tutorials, scenario-based learning, traditional online learning, and education gaming/modules/scenarios to further educate and demonstrate this technology.“We don’t see the TIGER Virtual Learning Environment as the answer; it is one of many solutions ,” says Patricia Hinton Walker R.N., Ph.D., TIGER Phase III Chair, and Vice President for Nursing Policy and Professor of Nursing, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “We see it as an opportunity to do what TIGER has historically done, which is point people back to specialty practice groups, provider or educational institutions/organizations, professional associations and industry which have great content already.”The VLE will launch later this year with a plan to work with John A. Logan College in Carterville, Ill., to provide a sandbox to pre-test materials before they launch. The Virtual learning environment (VLE) will be housed at the Center For Connected Medicine (CCM) at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center (UPMC).They will be working with HIMSS and the actual materials will be stored on a server provided by the IBM corporation at the CCM. Currently, a content management committee is pulling together educational materials that already exist from sources like the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and vetting other content sources for technical compliance. TIGER is also working on publishing rules for organizations for donating modules to the VLE. A new TIGER transition board is being put into place to manage the new TIGER Initiative Foundation and build on the current activities, contributions, and vision. The new board will be releasing the vision for the Foundation (including but not limited to the VLE) in the near future, including plans to take this effort global.