At Healthforce Center, our research on the health care workforce offers timely analysis and guidance for providers, policymakers and funders in addressing critical delivery and improvement challenges. We have a team of nationally recognized research experts who work to define issues and support health policy change with rigorous analysis, high-quality data and actionable recommendations.
Our expertise covers the entire health workforce — the full range of licensed professions, credentialed occupations, and emerging roles such as community health workers and peer providers, and across all types of settings from acute to long-term care. We specialize in examining evolving trends in care models, care team composition, and promising new models for the delivery of high-quality health care.
Committed to Improving Health Equity
Our commitment to improving health equity and ensuring a diverse health workforce translates into research that emphasizes expanding cultural competence and language concordance, promoting workforce diversity through education and development programs, and evaluating care models that ensure health equity.
- Kaiser Permanente Southern California has developed an innovative tool, the Proactive Office Encounter (POE), embedded in its cutting-edge electronic health record system, HealthConnect. The POE interface prompts medical assistants and licensed vocational nurses to remind patients at the time of...
- High Plains Community Health Center, a federally qualified health center in Colorado, redesigned its workflow to increase productivity by increasing the number of support staff per provider. Medical Assistants (MAs) are cross-trained to rotate through front and back office roles in a team-based...
- Close to 300,000 actively licensed registered nurses (RNs) live in California, making nursing the largest health profession in the state. California’s RN workforce has doubled in size since 1980, and RN wage growth has been very strong compared with other health care occupations. Still, the rate...
- Cabin Creek Health Systems, a federally-qualified health clinic in West Virginia, trained a team of experienced Medical Assistants to provide risk assessments and care coordination to elderly patients, and to conduct home visits to frail elderly patients in remote rural areas. The organization...
- Policy brief on the impact of the Affordable Care Act on demand for health professionals in California and on provisions of the Affordable Care Act that address health workforce needs.
- Recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market. However, there is little direct empirical support for these models. We use an exogenous change in wages at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals as a natural experiment to...
- As many tenured nonprofit leaders prepare to transition out of leadership roles, studies predict an approaching gap in the leadership pipeline. They report that a limited number of “next generation leaders” are ready and eager to accept senior leadership positions. This impending gap is evident in...
- In 2005, the UNITE HERE (Union) Health Center in New York City embarked on a new initiative that expanded the role of medical assistants (MAs) to provide team-based care and health coaching for patients with chronic diseases. This initiative includes the creation of a career ladder for medical...
- It has long been known that certain ethnic and racial groups are underrepresented in the health professions. We looked specifically at participation rates of men of color in health professions education programs in California and found that the representation of African American and Latino men is...
- The quality domains of patient-centered and equitable care are increasingly relevant to today's healthcare leaders as hospitals care for patients with increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic needs. Hospital leaders face substantial tensions in defining their organization's strategic priorities...
- AIM: To examine whether there were improvements in the satisfaction of hospital-employed registered nurses (RNs) in the mid-2000s. BACKGROUND: In recent years, many hospitals have made efforts to improve workplace characteristics, in order to improve nurse satisfaction and retention. There has...
- Registered nurses (RNs) who work outside of nursing have seldom been examined. This aim of this study was to compare the 122,178 (4%) of RNs who are employed outside of nursing to those who work in nursing jobs in terms of sociodemographic, market, and political variables to determine if these...
- Registered nurses (RNs) who work outside of nursing have seldom been examined. This aim of this study was to compare the 122,178 (4%) of RNs who are employed outside of nursing to those who work in nursing jobs in terms of sociodemographic, market, and political variables to determine if these...
- Web directory of US nursing schools and programs (7,700+ programs, from 2,300+ schools).
- Physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) play a critical role in the delivery of primary care in California’s licensed community clinics. Between 2005 and 2008, however, clinics increasingly relied on PAs and NPs as care providers. The use of PAs increased more than the use of NPs....
- There has been growing interest in expansion of the role of medical assistants (MAs) in community clinics, where their utilization has increased in recent years. Ten clinics identified as using MAs in an expanded capacity were studied for this brief. Innovative roles typically involved the...
- The objective of this paper is to describe the purpose, rationale and key elements of the special issue, Improving Oral Healthcare Delivery Systems through Workforce Innovations. The purpose of the special issue is to further develop ideas presented at the 2009 Institute of Medicine (IOM) workshop...
- California’s Health Workforce Pilot Projects (HWPP) program was established in 1972 and is administered by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. The HWPP program offers an opportunity to safely demonstrate and evaluate new approaches to care delivery before changing laws and...
- The shortage of primary care providers (PCPs) in the United States may be worsened with health reform if more individuals receive health insurance coverage. Previous research suggests that Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) can provide as high quality care and achieve the same health...
- Objectives To determine whether nurse staffing in California hospitals, where state-mandated minimum nurse-to-patient ratios are in effect, differs from two states without legislation and whether those differences are associated with nurse and patient outcomes. Data Sources Primary survey data from...
- Each year, the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN) requires all pre-licensure registered nursing programs in California to complete a survey detailing statistics of their programs, students and faculty. The survey collects data from August 1 through July 31 of the following year....
- The 2008 Survey of Registered Nurses gathered data on the licensed nursing workforce in California, including race/ethnicity, education, hours worked, and job satisfaction. This presentation shares findings from this survey as well as the 2009 Forecasts of the Registered Nursing Workforce in...
- The purpose of this project was to understand the role of medical assistants in solo and small primary care physician practices. The study team described the background, training, and certification of medical assistants, assessed the gaps in their training, and discussed the impact these gaps may...
- This issue brief describes utilization of Registered Nurses (RN), Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVN), and medical assistants (MA) over the period 2005-2008. We found that the proportion of clinic sites reporting utilization of RNs and LVNs generally did not change during this period, while use of...
- The Joint Commission developed Advancing Effective Communication, Cultural Competence, and Patient- and Family-Centered Care: A Roadmap for Hospitals to inspire hospitals to integrate concepts from the fields of communication, cultural competence, and patient- and family-centered care into their...
- Provision of language services is central to the delivery of equitable, safe, high-quality health care for patients with limited English proficiency. However, there are many barriers to ensuring access to such services. We analyzed the experience of a model language service program at a public...
- This issue brief examines the State of California’s Health Workforce Pilot Projects Program, which promotes demonstrations to test new practice models for improved care delivery by: 1) granting temporary legal waivers for providers to perform additional duties; 2) creating new provider categories;...
- Community health workers (CHWs), medical assistants (MAs), certified nurse assistants (CNAs), and home health aides (HHAs) are among California’s most highly demanded and largest allied health groups. This issue brief summarizes the estimated numbers, average wages, employment settings, duties, and...
- Background: Mentors are important in the personal and professional development of medical students. Little is known about how the structure of a mentoring program impacts on student‐faculty relationships. Description: To evaluate and compare 2 structurally different mentoring programs at Stanford...
- Oral Health in America: A Report of the Surgeon General (SGROH) and National Call to Action to Promote Oral Health outlined the need to increase the diversity, capacity, and flexibility of the dental workforce to reduce oral health disparities. This paper provides an update on dental workforce...