Emerging Roles in Allied Health Occupations
Description:
Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify how five domains of emerging roles in healthcare (care coordination, disease management, navigation, patient education, and peer role) have been incorporated into the job titles and descriptions of healthcare occupations by using Real Time Labor Market Information (RT-LMI) data from LinkUp, a job search engine company. RT-LMI is a source of data that is increasingly used to monitor workforce demand, extracts information from online job ads to track demand for general labor market skills, including for the health workforce.
Design/Methods: Using data obtained by web-scraping tools to extract job ad information from companies, we analyzed job ads in the US from 2014 and 2015. Our team developed a list of healthcare occupations based on the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system as well as a list of emerging roles and related job titles based on literature and our team’s expertise. We used natural language processing (NLP) techniques including text parsing, string matching, and word positioning to identify specific skills and roles. We looked at the sample of job ads where the job title field matched one of the occupations from our list of healthcare occupations and looked for emerging role terms that appeared at least once in either the title field or job description. We also looked at the sample of job ads where the job title field matched our list of emerging role terms.
Results: Care coordination was the most common emerging role appearing in healthcare job ads, either in the job title or job description, in 2014 and 2015. Disease management and patient education were more frequently mentioned in 2015 compared to 2014. Physical therapists, social workers, nursing assistants and medical assistants were among the allied health occupations mentioned in job ads in which emerging roles appeared. Care coordination was a dominant emerging role for occupations across all education requirement categories in the job ads examined, and disease management became a more frequently requested emerging role between 2014 and 2015. Jobs requiring a high school degree or below rarely referenced an emerging role despite the relatively high frequency of job ads for healthcare jobs at this education level. Often, where an emerging role was identified in the job title, no other specific healthcare occupation was identified within either the job title or job description, suggesting that these occupations are becoming stand-alone healthcare occupations.
Conclusions: In this study we found that RT-LMI can provide valuable information on the emergence of new skills and roles in the health workforce, including for many allied health occupations. Findings from this study contribute to the development of methods for monitoring and tracking changing healthcare workforce demands using large electronic databases of job ads. This important information on how employers associate skills with posted job titles can help educational institutions, training programs, accrediting bodies and health workforce planners better prepare workers with the competencies to meet market demand.
This study resulted in a full report and a 2-page policy brief that can be found in the publications section of our website.
Lead Researcher: Bianca K. Frogner, PhD
Contact Info: bfrogner@uw.edu
Funder:
HRSA: HWRC Allied Health
Status:
Complete
Publications/Presentations
| Authors | Title | Type | Date | Documents/Media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frogner BK, Stubbs BA, Skillman SM | Emerging Roles and Occupations in the Health Workforce | PUBLICATION | 08-01-2018 | Policy Brief Full Report |
| Stubbs BA, Frogner BK, Skillman SM | Emerging Roles and Occupations in the Health Workforce | PRESENTATION | 06-25-2018 | Poster |
| Stubbs BA, Frogner BK, Skillman SM | Emerging Roles and Occupations in the Health Workforce | PRESENTATION | 06-23-2018 | Poster |
| Frogner BK, Stubbs BA, Skillman SM | Emerging Roles and Occupations in the Health Workforce | PRESENTATION | 05-11-2018 | PowerPoint presentation |