Identifying Emerging Occupations and Related Skills Gaps

Research Spotlight

Identifying Emerging Occupations and Related Skills Gaps

Overview

In 2014, it was clear to NYACH that anticipated funds through New York State’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program would accelerate the industry adoption of population health and value-based care models, and that this would be an opportunity to build smarter workforce practices. To transition to value-based care models, the industry would need to adopt new staffing models and staff behaviors to achieve new performance outcomes in care coordination, patient-centered communication, and clinical quality. The workforce system, however, was largely unaware of this pending influx of funding and attention on these skills and titles. To better understand what these trends looked like on the ground in industry, and to be able to translate these changes for workforce stakeholders in an actionable way, NYACH commissioned the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) to survey dozens of downstate primary care practices and compile an analysis of their findings.

Key Findings

GNYHA shared the findings of this survey in the report Emerging Positions in Primary Care (2014), which anticipated a 27% overall growth in the primary care workforce in the following two years, and a huge 127% expected increase in need over the same period for a host of new emerging occupations in ambulatory care settings, including: care coordinators, care managers, community health workers, peer support workers, and patient navigators. The research also surfaced the difficulties employers faced in recruiting for these relatively new positions, underscoring the need to standardize job descriptions and related education and experience, and also to support the workforce training pipeline in enabling skills training for both new and incumbent workers in patient communication, teamwork and team-based care, and care coordination. This research was foundational to NYACH’s work in emerging occupations over the subsequent years, though it should be added that the industry’s early hiring enthusiasm for emerging occupations was later tempered by the realities of revenue and funds flow–some discussions of which are included in later sections of this report.