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.
- California’s health care industry employed more than 1.7 million people in 2019. Among these workers, nearly 50% were employed in ambulatory settings, 32% in hospitals, and 18% in nursing or residential care facilities. An aging population and population growth will likely contribute to increased...
- This issue of CIN Connections contains strategies and reflections from health care leaders as they grapple with how to abolish racism to improve health and remove roadblocks to real health equity. Hear from Dr. Rhea Boyd of the California Children’s Trust and of 2-1-1 San Diego about how structural...
- Over the course of 12 years, the Blue Shield of California Foundation committed nearly $20 million to growing a pool of community health center leaders who were prepared to be effective agents of change in their organizations and in the safety net field. This signature investment, the Clinic...
- Community paramedicine, also known as mobile integrated health, is an innovative model of care that is being implemented throughout the United States. From 2014 to 2020, the California Emergency Medical Services Authority sponsored a Health Workforce Pilot Project under which specially trained...
- Community health workers (CHWs) are an increasingly important member of the healthcare and public health professions who help build primary care capacity. Yet, in spite of the exponential growth of CHW interventions, CHW training programs, and CHW certification and credentialing by state agencies,...
- Care plans are an evidence-based strategy, encouraged by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and are used to manage the care of patients with complex health needs that have been shown to lead to lower hospital costs and improved patient outcomes. Providers participating in payment...
- This report provides California policymakers with up-to-date information about the state’s physician workforce and the pipeline of trainees in the state’s medical schools and graduate medical education (GME) programs, often referred to as residency programs.
- Growing recognition that socioeconomic adversity impacts health outcomes has led the healthcare sector to support initiatives that address social determinants of health (SDOH). There is an opportunity to leverage performance measures to further incentivize these interventions and track adoption....
- Care coordination is a key strategy used to improve health outcomes and efficiency, yet there are limited examples in dentistry. A large dental accountable care organization piloted care coordination by retraining existing administrative staff to coordinate the care of high-risk patients. Following...
- The Support at Home pilot program provided financial support for the purchase of home care services by middle-income adults with disabilities in San Francisco to support aging in place. The mixed-methods evaluation of the program incorporated administrative records, surveys of clients and...
- Proposition 209 prohibits the use of affirmative action – the practice of considering an individuals’ race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin – in public education, employment and contracting. This brief expands on previous studies that analyzed the impact of Proposition 209 on the racial/...
- The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disrupted the education and clinical training of nursing students. Clinical sites shut out students over low equipment supplies, physical distancing requirements, and redeployment of staff. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a progressive solution to...
- One of the most important possibilities of value-based payment is its potential to spur innovation in upstream prevention, such as attention to social needs that lead to poor health. However, there is uncertainty about the conditions under which value-based payment will encourage health care...
- The aim of this systematic review is to assess if penalty-based pay-for-performance (P4P) programs are more effective in improving quality and cost outcomes compared to two other payment strategies (i.e., rewards and a combination of rewards and penalties) for surgical care in the United States. A...
- Access to oral healthcare remains a significant problem in the United States. One solution that has gained momentum over the past decade is the expansion of the oral health workforce through the addition of a new member: the dental therapist (DT). This article describes the progress and development...
- Personal care, home health, and nursing aides provide the majority of care to chronically ill and disabled older adults. This workforce faces challenging working conditions, resulting in high turnover and workforce instability that affect the quality of care for older adults. We examined the...
- The year 2020 has been unlike any other. The changes we’re now seeing in our clinics and through our screens, and the methods being used to address patient needs that we hadn’t previously considered will impact health care for years to come. This issue of CIN Connections features reflections from...
- Medical providers are significant drivers of care in post-acute long-term care (PALTC) settings, yet little research has examined the medical provider workforce and its role in ensuring quality of care. This study examined the impact of nursing home medical staffing organization (NHMSO) dimensions...
- The health workforce has been greatly affected by COVID-19. In this commentary, we describe the articles included in this health workforce research supplement and how the issues raised by the authors relate to the COVID-19 pandemic and rapidly changing health care environment.
- Between February 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began and August 2020, the nation has watched over 5.2 million individuals become infected and over 167,000 deaths. Unfortunately, many of the infections and deaths have been nursing home residents and staff. To date, the Centers for Medicare and...
- Learning health‐care systems are foundational for measuring and achieving value in oral health care. This article describes the components of a preventive dental care program and the quality of care in a large dental accountable care organization. A retrospective study design describes and...
- Holistic review is a conceptual framework that encourages medical schools to consider a wide range of criteria in deciding which applicants to admit. It promotes a balanced approach to the admissions process, taking into account both the need to admit students whose Medical College Admissions Test...
- The purpose of this report is to outline the findings from the third year (July 1, 2019-June 30, 2020) of the San Francisco Support at Home (S@H) pilot program. This report provides some background information on the program, but more information and context can be found in the Year 1 and Year 2...
- Country-level data suggest large differences in the supply of health professionals among European countries. However, little is know about the regional supply of health professionals taking a cross-country comparative perspective. The aim of the study was to analyse the regional distribution of...
- Populations residing in rural America have lower rates of dental care utilization, higher rates of dental caries, less water fluoridation, and fewer dentists per capita when compared to those living in urban environments. Dental workforce shortages in rural communities are endemic, despite the...
- Several trends suggest that the nurse practitioner (NP) workforce has untapped potential to expand healthcare capacity to increase access to care. The aim of this study was to examine NPs as usual source of care providers and investigate their relationship with state scope-of-practice regulations.
- The objective of this study was to estimate trends in the percentage of Medicare beneficiaries cared for by nurse practitioners from 2012 to 2017, to characterize beneficiaries cared for by nurse practitioners in 2017, and to examine how the percentage of beneficiaries cared for by nurse...
- Although there has been significant progress across states to remove or diminish barriers to the exercise of full scope of practice by advanced practice registered nurses (APRN), state regulations continue to unnecessarily restrict APRN practice in most of the United States. This article integrates...
- The objective of this study was to explore how home care workers and the agencies that employ them interact with their state’s nurse practice act in the provision of care. Using a qualitative case study approach, they selected four states with varying levels of restrictiveness in their nurse...
- The delivery of medical care services in US nursing homes (NH) is dependent on a workforce comprised of physicians, nurse practitioners (NP), and physician assistants (PA). Each of these disciplines operate under a unique regulatory framework while adhering to common standards of care. NH provider...