CAMEI COOPERATION ACTION PLAN: A SYSTEMATIC DOCUMENTATION TOOL OF INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION ON FOSTERING IT SKILLS FOR HEALTHCARE ENHANCING SHARE AND REUSE OF DIGITAL EDUCATION RESOURCES

Addressing IT skills for healthcare workforce is seen as an important element of achieving greater social inclusion, as identified in EU and National policy areas. Digital skills offer a gateway to supportive networks, expert patient groups, advice, information and new learning opportunities, social networks and more. Providing the means and the guidelines of sharing, re-using, and repurposing technologies of new educational material and programs for IT-skilled workforce in healthcare applied in different contexts, different languages and cultures in the EU and USA, the CAMEI project allowed new ways of boosting knowledge and provide IT skills to healthcare workforce of EU and USA. CAMEI aimed to coordinate research activities and policies towards the development of renewed educational material and programs, to boost new trends for acquiring new knowledge in respect of the implementation of eHealth systems in practice, foster trans-national access to research infrastructures from both EU and USA partners and establish a network of best practices in Medical Education Informatics. One of CAMEI’s main objectives was to promote joining research forces between Europe and the US, while at the same time breaking scientific silos in the areas of e-learning, Medical Education, Medical Informatics and standardization. Re-enforcing research activities in the Medical Education Informatics (MEI) domain would not only increase research quality across the two sides of the Atlantic, but also produce tangible education and technical outcomes as well. In order this to be achievable, there is a need to document in a systematic manner the series of steps needed to ensure that the collaboration cases identified are implemented as intended. Thus, in this paper the development of a Cooperation Action Plan (CAP) approach is described, resulting to templates to systematically describe CAPs and provision of best practice guidelines for how to fill-in the CAP templates. The CAMEI CAP was built on the “White Paper on IT skills for healthcare workforce in the EU and USA and cooperation opportunities” released in 2014. We resulted to a Cooperation Action Plan having two main parts:
(i) the relation between the strategies and resources to the measures of implementation and ultimate goals, and
(ii) the series of steps needed to ensure that collaboration proceeds as planned.

Furthermore two cases are deployed to show potential permanent characteristics as best practice examples, addressing the challenges of how to provide joint EU/US training methods and programmes that are open and scalable, and the development of a model to record IT skills and competences for Health Informaticians.