The faces of public health and technology are changing to involve more diverse communities, more areas of study and more perspectives, and it’s starting at two California colleges.
Thanks to a $75 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Cal State Long Beach and UC Irvine are two of 10 schools nationwide chosen to advance the Public Health Informatics & Technology (PHIT) Workforce Development Program.
CSULB received $10 million to recruit and train minority students in public health informatics through “an equity lens,” with the goal of training at least 700 students. UCI received $7 million to do the same.
The programs are building public and private partnerships to teach students how to design technology in the world of healthcare to bridge the gaps facing underserved communities.
For recent UCI graduate Letsy Cahue-Flores, it’s the “best of both worlds,” where she’s able to pursue a career in both technology and healthcare to make the public health sector more accessible for families like hers.
Growing up, Cahue-Flores said she had to translate for her parents every time they would go to the doctors or emergency room. She decided in high school that she wanted to explore technology and healthcare, and informatics came up at the top of her career Google search.
“That kind of exposed me to this necessity of accessibility for minorities and underrepresented, underserved communities,” Cahue-Flores said.
She studied public health informatics, an area of study that’s seen a rapid period of growth in the last decade. It combines healthcare, public health policy, computer science, coding, information technology and user experience.
“If you want to study computing and if you want to study the use of technology and how it helps our life and society, then informatics is the way to go.”
Kai Zheng, PHIT program director and professor at UC Irvine
She’s part of the class that has benefitted from the PHIT program, which is on its third year of government funding, with two years left to expand and recruit. Some areas of focus she studied was creating technology making it easier for people to access their lifelong health records and designing socio-technical solutions for childhood cancer survivors.
“PHIT brings [informatics] to people who don’t have a strong clinical background … Now it feels like anyone can learn about health informatics,” Cahue-Flores said.
It’s a goal that CSULB, UCI and eight other U.S. universities have been acutely pursuing by reaching out to students in various majors and backgrounds.
Dr. Kamiar Alaei is the health science department chair for CSULB’s College of Health and Human Services and the co-director of the California Consortium for Public Health Informatics and Technology. He’s been working with public health informatics for the past 20 years, but the last three have been focused on trying to integrate with other departments on campus.
He called the intersection of informatics and technology “the future of public health” where they can bring in new avenues for students to study. This year, CSULB will hire four additional informatics professors to advance the PHIT program and reach more students.
“Given this is an interdisciplinary field, [students] may come with different majors and our goal is how we can link them?” Alaei said. “Computer science students don’t know anything about public health, but they can use public health and technology as a tool.”
Kai Zheng, PHIT program director and professor at UCI, said by casting a wider net for students to pursue public health informatics, they are hoping to “create more representation in the public health workforce.”
Zheng has been involved in public health informatics since 2000 and has been a firsthand witness to the field’s growth. When he came to UCI in 2015, he said he was one of two faculty members teaching informatics. They now have over 10 informatics professors.
Informatics still has a long way to go, Zheng said. “It’s still not a core component of public health accreditation. In the past 10 years, we’ve gone through two update cycles and it’s still not a core part of public health.”
He said the federal funding has helped them reach more students, but they are up against a clock with only two more years to advance the program. Zheng said their focus now is to “build a structure” around informatics that will last beyond the federal funding.
“I tell them [students] if you want to study computing and if you want to study the use of technology and how it helps our life and society, then informatics is the way to go,” Zheng said, adding that many of these fields are going to converge in the coming years, meaning informatics can put students ahead of the curve.
To learn more about CSULB’s and UCI’s public health informatic programs, visit the school’s website.
