Quoting official press release:

Surgient, the leader in virtual lab management applications for automating software demo, test and training labs, today announced that its Virtual Training Lab Management System (VTMS) application is being used by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) to enable hands-on learning as part of AHIMA's electronic health information management (e-HIM) Virtual Lab initiative.

HIM professionals must be highly proficient with a variety of complex healthcare systems in the workplace. Unfortunately, it is both impractical and cost-prohibitive for many colleges and universities to procure, operate and maintain the enterprise software and infrastructure necessary to adequately support hands-on HIM education.

Funded by AHIMA's Foundation of Research and Education (FORE), and developed in partnership with several academic institutions and HIM software partners, the lab will enable HIM students to effectively build and reinforce skills in the classroom and online by providing access to fully-functional HIM applications in a sandbox learning environment.

"The goal of the e-HIM Virtual Lab is to make it easy and cost-effective for schools offering HIM programs to satisfy the hands-on learning needs of their students," said Sandra Kersten, MPH, RHIA, senior project manager at AHIMA. "We chose Surgient VTMS because it met our key criteria including lights-out operation (24x7), automated provisioning of complex applications, browser-based access and scalability."

AHIMA is currently piloting the e-HIM Virtual Lab with 1,900 students and instructors from 47 academic programs around the country - with the goal of having 100 academic programs and 4,000 students participating by the end of 2007. Using VTMS, instructors can reserve labs for an entire class that's delivered in-person or online. Students may also schedule or access labs on-demand to practice and reinforce what they've learned.

"The e-HIM Virtual Lab is a powerful tool because it gives our students valuable hands-on experience with today's HIM applications," said Desla Mancilla, assistant professor, HIM Program, Texas State University-San Marcos. "Going forward, we see virtual labs as a new type of learning object -- one that can be easily shared, repurposed and embedded in our curriculum to ensure we're providing the education our students need to be successful."

"Rising application complexity and change create barriers to learning due to the cost and inflexibility of the infrastructure needed to make enterprise applications available to students," said Erik Josowitz, Surgient vice president of marketing. "Using Surgient VTMS, organizations like AHIMA are providing innovative solutions that leverage the power of virtualization to quickly, reliably and securely provision these applications on-demand."