Breaking With Tradition, UF Forges Public/Private Partnership To Meet New Training Needs Emerging With Health-Care Reform

May 16, 1996

GAINESVILLE–In a rapidly changing health-care system, fear strikes at the heart of many health professionals who are finding their specialized training does not meet new marketplace demands.

To fill that training gap, educators at the University of Florida have broken with tradition and forged an alliance with private business to provide “niche training” to practicing health-care professionals.

The new program is being administered and marketed nationwide through a new venture company, INTELICUS, established through a partnership between UF’s College of Health Professions and the Rehabilitation Training Institute owned by The Kirven Group of Orlando.

“We’re dedicating this enterprise to a dynamic mission—to give health professionals a chance to obtain the advanced niche training they need without having to leave their jobs,” said Dr. Horace Sawyer, chairman of the rehabilitation counseling department at UF’s College of Health Professions and a national leader in rehabilitation education.

“We’re placing our emphasis on the areas of greatest need in the health-care industry and we’re not limiting ourselves to rehabilitation-related topics,” Sawyer said. “We plan to develop innovative skill-set products on a wide range of health-related subjects in keeping with the changing needs of health-care professionals.”

UF President John Lombardi said, “Universities have an obligation to find new ways to deliver their expertise to professionals. Public-private partnerships offer opportunities to reconfigure the expert knowledge of the university into forms and delivery systems that best serve the needs of dispersed professionals working in many different health-care environments.

“The INTELICUS partnership puts the university squarely into the marketplace for high quality health care education while testing our skills and challenging our innovation,” Lombardi said.

The Florida program already offers courses that qualify health professionals to develop lifecare plans (plans that define all of the medical costs and other expenditures needed for the lifetime of the patient) for people with catastrophic disabilities. Seminars on lifecare planning are offered in Orlando, Atlanta, San Antonio, Kansas City and San Diego.

Soon to be added will be seminars on workers’ compensation, impairment rating and functional capacity and ergonomics, which involves adaptations of home and workplace environments to accommodate the needs of individuals with disabilities.

Plans also call for creating a distance learning institute that will enable health professionals to participate in training through the Internet.

“Our programs are being tailored to meet emerging needs in the changing health-care marketplace, but naturally the University of Florida stands to gain as well,” said Robert Frank, dean of UF’s College of Health Professions. “This must be profit-making to succeed, and we’ll devote part of those earnings to improve teaching and research programs that are not sufficiently supported by government funds.

“We’ve been evaluating the health-care marketplace to identify the educational niches that are emerging, and we’re developing programs through

which health practitioners can acquire skills they can apply immediately in the workplace. We know the constraints that typically prevent universities from developing new curricula quickly and we decided to break new ground by partnering with business experts to develop a high-quality non-degree teaching program,” Frank added.

By combining the corporate management ‘muscle’ of INTELICUS with UF’s established academic foundation in educating rehabilitation professionals, new teaching packages are being developed quickly. Professionals who successfully complete each sequence of training modules are awarded professional certificates from UF and INTELICUS.

For many of the health professional “students,” some of the credit hours completed in the certification programs can be applied to maintaining their professional credentials. For example, the working health-care professional can complete a sequence of eight modules in lifecare planning—each of which is taught in a two-day seminar—within a year or less.

“Across the country, the downsizing of large health-care facilities and an increasing demand for cross-trained specialist-consultants have created the need for special-skills education,” said Rogers Kirven, president of the Kirven Group and former Wall Street investor. “We’re offering what we call leading edge, take-away learning that health-care professionals can apply immediately and for which they can be reimbursed.

“We aim to adapt the program to changing demands of the health-care

system,” Kirven said. “We welcome ideas from health care administrators and managerial staffs who want to suggest certain skills for which training is needed. We’ll custom-design training programs to meet those needs.”