ONC Allocates $80M for Public HIT Workforce Program, COVID-19 Data Collection

Using funding from the White House’s American Rescue Plan, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is announcing the establishment of an $80 million Public Health Informatics & Technology (PHIT) Workforce Development Program that will aim to strengthen U.S. public health informatics and data science.

As part of this launch, ONC is inviting college and universities—particularly Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs)—to apply for funding through a consortium that will develop the curriculum, recruit and train participants, secure paid internship opportunities, and assist in career placement at public health agencies, public health-focused non-profits or public health-focused private sector or clinical settings.

The PHIT Workforce Program aims to train more than 4,000 individuals over a four-year period through an interdisciplinary approach in public health informatics and technology. Under the PHIT Workforce Program, ONC will award up to $75 million to cooperative agreement recipients and use the remaining $5 million to support the program’s overall administration. Award recipients will need to ensure their training, certificate, degree, and placement programs are sustainable to create a continuous pipeline of diverse public health information technology professionals, federal officials said.

“The limited number of public health professionals trained in informatics and technology was one of the key challenges the nation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., National Coordinator for Health IT. “This new funding will help to address that need by supporting the efforts of minority serving institutions and other colleges and universities across the nation to educate and launch individuals into public health careers.”

The announcement “supports the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to root out pervasive health and socioeconomic inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic and ensure our healthcare system is better equipped for the next public health emergency,” according to federal health officials.

They further note that the pandemic has exposed gaps in the system’s public health reporting and data analysis, particularly around race and ethnicity-specific data. “Some of these gaps can be attributed to limited technological infrastructure and chronic underfunding of the staff needed to support public health data reporting at the state and local levels,” they noted.

Federal efforts to center equity in the COVID-19 response and future public health responses “will be improved by robust data collection and reporting around infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates, as well as underlying health and social vulnerabilities, that is disaggregated by race and ethnicity, age, gender, and other key variables,” officials stated.

Indeed, the crisis has unearthed that there simply isn’t reliable enough race and ethnicity data available that allows healthcare stakeholders to understand key contributors to disparities. According to a recently launched Health Equity Tracker, for instance, 38 percent of COVID-19 cases reported unknown race and ethnicity.

“Representation is important – particularly when we are deploying technology to tackle our most pressing healthcare challenges. Ensuring that diverse representation is better reflected all throughout our health care system is priority for the Biden-Harris administration,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “With this funding, we will be able to train and create new opportunities for thousands of minorities long underrepresented in our public health informatics and technology fields. Investing in efforts that create a pipeline of diverse professionals, particularly in high-skilled public health technology fields, will help us better prepare for future public health emergencies.”