The Department of Labor (DoL) has released $225 million in the form of grants for job training in emerging and in-demand health care sectors such as health information technology, nursing and applied care. Below you will find a summary of the grant opportunity as well as the full text of the DoL guidelines issued in the Federal Register. The money is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, popular known as the "stimulus", which was passed by Congress in February and was among the first official acts of the Obama Administration.
Little detail of how the funds were to be spent was provided in the original legislation and federal agencies have largely sought to direct money toward areas of the economy determined to have the greatest potential return on investment. The decision to use stimulus funds to retrain an American workforce that is currently experiencing levels of unemployment not seen since the early 1980's makes a lot of sense, particularly when that retraining is focused on jobs in technology-intensive industries.
The industry in the greatest need of skilled information technology and otherwise technically proficient new workers is the health care sector, which has been the slowest of the major American industries to adopt information technology into its best practices in a meaningful way. This failure to keep pace with the general rate of innovation across the economy as a whole, especially across other similarly information intensive industries such as banking, is a significant contributor to the unrelenting rise in the cost of care at the center of the current health care reform debate in DC. Before radical industry restructuring is undertaken, it would be wise to wait and see how the major investments currently under deployment in innovating and modernizing the industry impact escalating costs. One need look no further than the experiences of other American industries to see the cost-benefit of ubiquitous IT adoption and the tremendous impact this cost savings has had on innovation generally.
The industry in the greatest need of skilled information technology and otherwise technically proficient new workers is the health care sector, which has been the slowest of the major American industries to adopt information technology into its best practices in a meaningful way. This failure to keep pace with the general rate of innovation across the economy as a whole, especially across other similarly information intensive industries such as banking, is a significant contributor to the unrelenting rise in the cost of care at the center of the current health care reform debate in DC. Before radical industry restructuring is undertaken, it would be wise to wait and see how the major investments currently under deployment in innovating and modernizing the industry impact escalating costs. One need look no further than the experiences of other American industries to see the cost-benefit of ubiquitous IT adoption and the tremendous impact this cost savings has had on innovation generally.
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