Courtesy of Bowie State University
This summer students in Bowie State University’s (BSU) computer science department participated in a month-long boot camp in an effort to help increase the number of public health professionals trained in informatics and technology while improving their knowledge of data science and skills in managing and protecting public health information.
Fifteen students along with 15 nurses, programmers, certified nursing assistants, and other working professionals comprised the initial cohort in a comprehensive training effort Bowie State has launched with a four-year, $10 million grant from the Public Health Informatics and Technology (PHIT) Workforce Development Program. Participants in the boot camp were introduced to the fundamentals of informatics including cleaning and visualization of data, data exchange, programming and managing health care data concepts. They were also provided information on how to properly manage and protect patient information, particularly during a pandemic.
“The PHIT program champions the use of U.S. public health information technology, will improve public and population health data collection (including COVID-19), information interoperability and most importantly increase representation of minorities within the public health information technology workforce,” said Dr. Philip De Melo, PHIT program principal investigator and Bowie State computer science professor. “The PHIT program will also increase the capacity of Bowie State and other institutions to train underrepresented students for years after the government support ends.”
A major goal of public health is to protect and improve the health and wellness of communities. The PHIT program will prepare students to collect and process multiple data streams to improve the delivery of public health services and equip students with the tools and skills needed to manage and analyze diverse datasets across multiple healthcare systems.
At Bowie State, specific PHIT modules will be developed for nursing, social work, information systems, bioinformatics and other disciplines as new graduate certificates in public health informatics and data science are developed with new undergraduate degree programs to follow.
Over the course of the next four years, BSU students and area professionals will have opportunities to learn skills required for public health management, patient care standards, public health data analytics, digital health, artificial intelligence and machine learning in public health science, disaster and emergency management and preparedness and cloud and big data technologies that enable the processing and exchange of massive healthcare datasets.
“There is heightened interest and demand from individuals already in the health care profession to learn more about public health informatics and technology,” said Dr. De Melo. “We will offer another boot camp in October specifically for healthcare career professionals who need to become more proficient in the field.”
Bowie State University is one of 10 awardees including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Institutions (ASNAPISIs), and other institutions of higher education to form multiple consortiums to train more than 4,000 individuals over four years in public health informatics and technology.
