Bellevue College is a student-centered, comprehensive, and innovative college that advances the life-long educational development of its students while strengthening the economic, social, and cultural life of its diverse community. The college promotes student success by providing high-quality, flexible, accessible educational programs and services; advancing pluralism, inclusion, and global awareness; and acting as a catalyst and collaborator for a vibrant region.

According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, academic access to Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems represented a key barrier nationally to workforce development in the Health IT (HIT) sector. Bellevue College was awarded an $11.8 million grant from the Department of Labor (DOL) to lead a geographically dispersed, nine-college consortium in developing and implementing an HIT training curriculum. This grant could enable them to not only develop and pilot new EMR system approaches for academic use, but to create a repeatable process and curriculum that could be replicated nationally.

We deployed our top resources and created on-demand instances of EMR products for each college and course. In addition, we leveraged Amazon Web Services to deliver hosted virtual desktops to simplify the configuration and usage of the EMR legacy “fat-clients” across all student operating systems and devices. We backed up this delivery mechanism with a robust tier 1–3 service desk and a quality control plan designed to be responsive to both faculty and student needs.

By collaborating with the college, we were able to deliver tailored software solutions from the enterprise level down to the desktop level across the consortium of colleges in less than a month.