ATLANTA – Students in the Morehouse School of Medicine’s Master of Public Health Program now have the opportunity to respond to public health inquiries for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Contact Center.

The on-the-job training is being made possible by a partnership with Morehouse School of Medicine and Vangent, a consulting firm specializing in information management and business process outsourcing.

Vangent has supported the CDC and the CDC-INFO program for more than five years. The program is a call center that responds to more than 800,000 telephone and e-mail inquiries on public health issues.

“This is an opportunity for these students to apply their public health knowledge in the real world,” said Kerry Weems, senior vice president for health strategy for Vangent.

The call line is unique in that it provides broad-based public health advice. Weems calls it an “extraordinarily effective way to disseminate public health messages.”

With the flu season underway and expected to peak in February, the call line should prove especially valuable both for the training the Morehouse students will receive and the knowledge they will impart.

Expect to see more partnerships grow and strengthen between business and academic institutions in the healthcare industry, said Weems, who is former administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and vice chairman of the American Health Information Community.

This will be true especially in regions where Centers of Academic Excellence are based, he said. Both Morehouse and the CDC are based in Atlanta, for example.

“You’ll see businesses like Vangent partner with academic institutions,” Weems said.