Community Health Centers (CHCs) serve nearly 1 in 6 Medicaid enrollees and provide perinatal care to about 560,000 people, playing a critical role in prenatal and postpartum care for disadvantaged populations. While 41% of CHCs—often larger centers with multidisciplinary teams—offer prenatal care to higher proportions of non-White or non-English-speaking patients, little is known about the…
Appropriate prenatal care is critical to ensuring safe childbirth, but many populations face barriers that create inequities in maternal health outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth emerged as a promising way to expand access, therefore driving its rapid adoption. This shift highlights the need to better understand the workforce providing telehealth for pregnancy care. This…
Extensive research has established a strong link between overall nurse staffing levels and certain patient safety outcomes. In contrast, the impact of agency nurse staffing on patient outcomes has been studied less frequently, with inconsistent results. US studies examining agency hours often rely on cross-sectional designs, which, along with similarly limited research on overtime hours,…
COVID-19 placed unprecedented strain on the health workforce. Early in the pandemic, providers faced a novel, highly infectious pathogen, and while some areas experienced increased health care demands, others saw limits in nonessential services and decreased patient visits, leading to financial pressures and layoffs. This Health Affairs Scholar article explores the use of the publicly…
Pediatric medical subspecialists offer care to children with uncommon or atypical health issues, those who haven’t responded well to standard primary care treatments, or those requiring specialized diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. Evaluating whether the number and distribution of these subspecialists meet the needs of the nation’s children is difficult due to a lack of evidence…
The physician assistant (PA) profession is among the least racially and ethnically diverse health professions requiring advanced education. Between 1995 and 2020, the percentage of Black PA graduates fell from 7% to 3.1%, while Hispanic representation increased from 4.5% to 7.9%. PA programs that transitioned from bachelor’s to master’s degrees experienced a 5.3% point decline…
Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) has been shown to be effective for treating patients suffering from opioid use disorders (OUD), but there is a shortage of providers with Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) waivers to provide such treatment. Designing policies that would assist in the retention of MAT providers who prescribe buprenorphine is dependent upon learning more…
Many community health centers (CHCs) have begun adjusting their payment systems to alter their workforce configurations. However, little is known about how these workforce adjustments impact the quality of patient care. This abstract discusses the development of a simulation tool that would help CHCs use data to model different workforce configuration scenarios to maximize patient…
As quality incentives are further integrated into payment systems, community health centers (CHCs) will need to optimize their workforce configuration to improve quality. Given the relative efficiency of advanced practice clinicians in producing quality, further hiring of these professionals is a cost‐effective investment for CHCs. This article explores optimal workforce configurations in the production of…
Community college (CC) is important for providing access to educational pathways for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, studies show that medical schools are less likely to accept qualified students who went to CC and thus may be missing opportunities to increase the diversity of their student body. This article describes a study that analyzed data…
