The datafication of Delaware’s nursing shortage

The American Hospital Association has stressed that it will continue if no intentional action is taken. In Delaware, some of that action started in April 2022 with a partnership between Tech Impact’s Data Innovation Lab and the Delaware Academy of Medicine/Delaware Public Health Association (DPHA) that includes data analysis of the state’s healthcare workforce as part of the Delaware Health Force initiative.

A new report released this month is accessible to the public at nursing data.healthforce.org.

“Delaware Health Force actually started before the pandemic, to look at and provide data for policy and resource allocation,” Timothy Gibbs, executive director of the DPHA, told Technical.ly. “The shortage areas in Delaware were for all sorts of medical providers — physicians, dentists, physical therapists, nursing, and so on. Nursing, which I think people are much more aware of than ever before, is the largest numerical component of our healthcare workforce by far, so when we have a shortage in nursing, it impacts health outcomes.”

Nursing deserts show up as red on the interactive data map, but the analysis is more complicated than some might expect, especially when nurse location data is sometimes logged by where these workers live, rather than the location of their medical facility. Some nurses work at multiple facilities, which also may not be reflected in the early data.

But it’s an important start that eventually will lead to opportunities for nurses and those who want to get into the field.

“[Nurses] provide a lot of the primary care to people in the industry,” said Héctor Maldonado-Reis, director of research development and analytics at Tech Impact. “They also have the potential of upskilling, because there are different levels of nurses — as an example, advanced practice registered nurses can prescribe mental health medications. So we were really thinking about how we can create opportunities around some of these aspects.”

More advanced practice registered nurses, or APRNs, would not only help with the nursing shortage but would also help to fill gaps from shortages of other providers.

Providing upskilling guidance to just 5% ​of Delaware’s current nurse population, they say, ​could potentially result in ​over 600 new high-level nurses.

Ultimately, the Data Lab and DPHA project, which was recently selected for a 2023 Drexel LeBow Analytics 50 award for its healthforce report’s data-driven business impact, are meant to replace conjecture with actionable data for medical providers and policymakers. A planned expansion to other disciplines will analyze the ratio of different types of medical providers.

“You have a physician, then you have nurses and you have other people that work in concert with them,” Gibbs said. “Theoretically, there are effective ratios between different types of providers. They will see, over time, what’s the right ratio for Delaware?”