BRIDGING THE COMPETENCY GAP IN HEALTHCARE IT EDUCATION: A DYNAMIC FRAMEWORK FOR CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT AND RECOMMENDATION

Abstract

In this study, we introduce a Data-Driven Competency Alignment Framework (DCAF) to analyze and align educational and industry needs in healthcare IT. DCAF analyzes curriculum and job announcements and proposes necessary competences, providing visualization and decision support tools such as heat maps for the design of the curriculum. The evaluation shows significant improvement on alignment score up to 41.6%. Employer and cursus developer feedback confirmed the system’s success to cover the most rankest skill-gaps. DCAF's data-driven, scalable approach allows us to constantly adapt to the latest trends and do more with less in terms of healthcare education and workforce preparation. Also innovative of the system is that it automatically recommends competencies that are not explicitly mentioned in job ads. It gives the system the feature to learn and adapt as the health requirements changes over time by incorporating time series learning trends in the system. Finally, DCAF offers a mechanism for closing the knowledge gap between academic readiness and practical health IT needs.