Efforts to boost Arkansas’ healthcare workforce will be hard to track without better data
Arkansas, like other states, faces challenges in maintaining access to healthcare professionals, especially in rural areas. Analyses of healthcare workforce data by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement show that Arkansas’ urban counties have significantly higher per capita rates of primary care physicians, OB-GYNs and general surgeons than the state’s rural counties. As of 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, 10 Arkansas counties had no OB-GYNs, and 15 counties had no general surgeons.
Policymakers are working to strengthen the state’s healthcare workforce. This year, Arkansas lawmakers approved measures to increase the number of medical residency positions in the state, create a working group on primary care payment improvement, and join interstate licensure compacts to make it easier for physicians and other healthcare professionals to practice in multiple states. Also, Arkansas’ application for federal funding under the Rural Health Transformation Program — which could bring the state about $1 billion over five years — indicates that some of the money will go toward expanding graduate medical educational opportunities and recruiting and retaining rural healthcare professionals.
Monitoring the progress of these and other investments to measure their success will require strong data collection. Unfortunately, there is currently no standardized method to collect data for healthcare professionals in Arkansas, nor any shared platform for data collection. Some licensure boards use a single online platform for licensure application, renewal and verification; change of contact information; and complaint filing. Others still obtain this information in paper form, which, if you’re lucky, is a fillable PDF form that can be emailed to the board rather than completed by hand on paper and snail-mailed.
Playing the blame game for these limitations, however, would not be fair. The lack of standardization and modernization is largely due to the state’s health professional licensure boards having been created as stand-alone entities in patchwork fashion. That meant each board, absent some requirement of law or national licensing or certifying body, decided how, to what extent, and how frequently it collected data from its licensees. Each board did what it could with the resources it had.
Thankfully, there is a great model for fixing this problem. In 2022, several national organizations came together to review existing survey tools and develop a resource for federal and state governments, organizations and researchers seeking to collect health workforce data. The result was the Cross-Profession Minimum Data Set, a framework for standardizing data collection across various health professions.
States such as Indiana, Utah and Wisconsin have adopted standardized data collection systems adapted from the national framework, allowing them to examine their healthcare workforces at a level that was previously impossible. For example, when the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services issued a report in August profiling that state’s dental workforce and identifying trends and needs, the agency’s director, Dan Hereth, credited Wisconsin’s adoption of the Cross-Profession Minimum Data Set with giving the agency access to 100% of Wisconsin’s licensed workforce.
Much of our work at the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement these days is devoted to examining Arkansas’ healthcare workforce, with a special emphasis on maternal healthcare. The data that we have in Arkansas, though, can only take our state so far in identifying the workforce gaps that demand policy solutions. Receptiveness of the licensure board members and the full support of policymakers are critical for Arkansas to standardize and modernize healthcare workforce data collection. Other states have shown they can get it done, and I know that we can, too.
Editor’s note: Craig Wilson, J.D., M.P.A., is the president and CEO of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, an independent, nonpartisan health policy center in Little Rock. The opinions expressed are those of the author.