Congratulations! Dr. Kim leads a team of PVAMU faculty to collaborate with UT Health for GET PHIT award.

Title: Gaining Equity in Training for Public Health Informatics and Technology

Project Summary: The Gaining Equity in Training for Public Health Informatics and Technology (GET PHIT) Consortium plans to train 1,400 students predominantly (greater than 75%) from underrepresented groups and 500 public health, clinic, and academic professionals, while placing 400 students in internships. Led by The University Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health (SPH) and School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI), the GET PHIT Consortium is collaborating with Huston-Tillotson University (HBCU); Prairie View A&M University (HBCU); Texas A&M International University (HSI); Texas Tech University Health Science Center; The University of Texas at Arlington (HSI); The University of Texas at El Paso (HSI); The University of Texas Permian Basin (HSI); and The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (HSI). The UTHealth SPH and SBMI schools, respectively, the largest and only schools of their type in Texas, are highly qualified to lead the GET PHIT Consortium with significant experience in offering joint certificates and degrees, as well as accelerated master’s degrees with undergraduate institutions. In addition GET PHIT will work with all consortium partners and the ONC Community of Practice to perform curricular needs assessments and develop competency- based curriculum in the areas of epidemiology, health data science, privacy and security, health equity, public health analytics, lab-based and remote diagnostics, public health reporting, semantic interoperability, public policy, multi-stream data management, social media listening, health literacy, as well as racism and bias in data use, especially for machine learning and artificial intelligence. The curriculum development will be supported by instructional design professionals and reviewed by the participating minority-serving institutions to ensure cultural sensitivity and competence. Students will participate in summer bootcamps, delivered both face-to-face and online; modules integrated into existing undergraduate curriculum; post-baccalaureate certificates; and master’s degrees. Professionals will have access to freely available, online, asynchronous public health informatics and technology curriculum throughout the life of the grant. GET PHIT will leverage its many public health, community, and other partners to ensure the student internships are meaningful. The consortium educational organizations will make use of their career centers, soft-skill training modules, and networking events, such as the annual conference, to ensure public health informatics employment for all interested persons. GET PHIT will conduct formative and summative evaluation of all activities, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, for continuous quality improvement of the training throughout the course of the grant. GET PHIT is committed to the sustainability of the curriculum, utilizing commonly available and open-source tools and publicly available datasets for all hands-on training activities. The academic professionals taking the professional training will contribute to the sustainability of the curriculum. After the grant funding ends, UTHealth will offer the professional development training for a nominal fee. The GET PHIT Consortium is committed to working with the ONC and the Community of Practice to make the curriculum publicly available following the grant, as well as sharing their best practices adopted and lessons learned while growing the underrepresented public health informatics and technology workforce.

For PVAMU press release, see PVAMU joins in share of $10 million opportunity to increase diversity in research, health care.