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About the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Training Program (AHRQTP)
The purpose of this training program is to train future scientists to design, implement, select, and evaluate health information technology that increases the quality and safety of healthcare. We will achieve this goal by training scientists who can develop and apply human-centered methods and techniques to health information technology, drawing from research and methods in human factors engineering, quality improvement, information sciences, and related areas.
To prepare scientists to meet this challenge, trainees must intermingle two training experiences. The first gives a solid foundation in informatics, research design and evaluation, human-centered design, and quality improvement. The second offers trainees first-hand experience through research programs that give them the opportunity to put their didactic training into practice by working on health information technology that increases the safety and quality of care.
Health Information Technology (HIT, also Health IT) promises to revolutionize the quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare. However, despite the promise of HIT and its many successes, over half of all HIT projects fail. They have cost overruns and delays, and in many cases unintentionally decrease the quality, efficiency, and safety of care. In most cases these problems are not technical and do not indicate a fundamental problem with the technology. Instead, HIT projects fail because they do not systematically apply human factors issues to the design and implementation of HIT, which leads to a fundamental mismatch between the technology and the needs and capabilities of its users.
Therefore, designing and implementing HIT is not as much an IT project as it is a human project about human-centered design issues such as usability, workflow, organizational change, and process re-engineering. In other industries such as aviation, nuclear power plants, automobiles, and consumer software and electronics, human-centered design is routine. In healthcare, however, the tendency is still to create a technology and then to train people to adapt to it, rather than to design technology to complement people's strengths and weaknesses and to meet the needs of the tasks at hand.
In order for HIT to fulfill its promise of increasing the quality and safety of healthcare, we need to train scientists who can develop and apply human-centered methods and techniques to the design, selection, implementation and evaluation of HIT. To prepare them to meet this challenge, trainees will first build a strong foundation of informatics, research design and evaluation, patient safety, human-centered design, and quality improvement, then apply this knowledge first-hand to HIT research programs that aim to increase the safety and quality of care.
The AHRQ Training Program curriculum and research projects will emphasize the design, selection, evaluation and implementation of HIT from a systems and human factors perspective. This will produce trainees who can address one or more of four of the priority areas for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ):
- translating research into practice and policy
- patient safety and quality
- quality improvement, and
- patient centered care.
The AHRQ Training Program will be managed through the W.M. Keck Center. Trainees may be enrolled at any of the following five Keck Center member universities participating in the proposal:
Research opportunities are available at these universities and at several other Texas Medical Center institutions and Centers that have agreed to participate as research sites in the program. These include:
For more information, see the links below or to the left.
Application information and forms
Frequently asked questions
Faculty directory
Curriculum
For information about the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC), other Keck Center Training Programs, and the GCC Research Consortia, please go to GCC Home.
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