Work on this initiative was started by the Delaware Academy of Medicine / Delaware Public Health Association (Academy/DPHA) and the Delaware Health Sciences Alliance (DHSA) long before the COVID-19 pandemic changed our world and the landscape of healthcare. The pandemic directly and profoundly impacted healthcare systems and individual providers.

Delaware Health Force (DHF) is a first-of-its-kind effort to create a public-private partnership to gather and aggregate data; introduce geographic mapping and population demographics/trends; all to better inform policy decisions and resource allocations based on the needs of the community. Importantly, this system is designed to operate in near real-time with a maximum 45-day lag in primary licensing data.

Core data comes from the Delaware Division of Professional Regulation’s Delpros database of publicly available information on all licensed healthcare providers, dentists, therapists, psychologists, and other related practitioners. Accessed monthly, DelPros is our “source of truth” that is then significantly augmented with a range of different information types from educational background, specialty and subspecialty, demographic, hospital affiliation, languages spoken, and other information. There are some excellent, recurrent surveys undertaken with target healthcare practitioners. Our system is more akin to weather forecasting – pulling information from various sources in (almost) real-time to allow response to be both dynamic and data-driven.