Bradley University is focusing much of its IT workforce grant money on building up the stable of credentialed computer science workers in the health care field, and particularly telehealth.
Bradley got just under $2 million of a $14 million federal Good Jobs Challenge grant from the U.S. Economic Development Adminstration. That was divvied up with Eureka College and Illinois Central College to develop the regional IT workforce.
Carolyn Craycraft is the IT Workforce Accelerator outreach coordinator at Bradley University.
"Central Illinois is really working to build up the IT pipeline. It's a need. Because when the grant was created, ICC and Bradley and Eureka all went out to local businesses and said, what are your needs? What are the jobs that we could look to fill in the area? And it was the overwhelming response," she said.
Bradley's nursing program made the institution the natural choice to take on health care computer science, Craycraft said.
Dr. Bobby Lucia is an assistant professor in the nursing department at Bradley. He says the pandemic forced the world into telehealth, but the technology has evolved.
"It started with talking to people on the phone and trying to assess them just using words and listening to how they spoke," Lucia said. "And we've moved into a lot of video interactions and how to use our current technology to support the patient, and taking those next steps to develop that technology further, to continue to support them."
The course starts with defining what telehealth is, then gets into the ethics of it. That means things like making sure the patient is alone when a medical professional is sharing health information with them.
Lucia says the three month course is seeing a diverse response, from Bradley students to seasoned professionals.
"It's really built for everyone the way that the modules are set up," he said.
Some of the other major components of health care IT include electronic medical records and health information management.
The IT Workforce Accelerator project runs through May of next year. It aims to train up and place 1,000 people in new computer science jobs.
To learn more about the IT Workforce Accelerator at Bradley, click here.
