Taming the Data Dragon - How the Delaware Health Force Took Control of their Data

The aging of the U.S. population and the healthcare industry workforce, coupled with an increase in chronic disease across the country, brought to life what is now the Delaware Health Force. By developing an initiative that takes a multi-faceted approach to healthcare workforce issues, DHF, a public/private partnership between the State of Delaware and the Delaware Academy of Medicine/Delaware Public Health Association, is helping to prevent the decline in healthcare workers in the state of Delaware through predictive planning and comprehensive data sets for better decision-making. But, providing that amount of complex data, and in ways that can be understood and acted on, comes with challenges, especially for nonprofits. That’s where Tech Impact’s Data Lab came into play. “Our core is data,” Tim Gibbs, Director and Principal Investigator of Delaware Health Force explained. “For a long-time, people had been talking in rather “unquantifiable terms” about shortages in primary care, but no one could go deeper to ask where they were or how bad they are because we didn’t have the data.” As senior medical professionals began to retire at the very time the larger US population was showing its age and needing additional care, it became the perfect storm. Needing clean and concise data was crucial to illustrate how the decline in healthcare workers was affecting the care chronic illnesses, which increased significantly over the past decade.

Tim knew Ryan Harrington, the Managing Director for Tech Impact’s Data Lab, and decided to give him a call when their organization started to see big challenges with their data during the pandemic. “The information we needed was scattered and disjointed – we needed patient data, provider data, census data - and when you have to go back and individually find this information and match it to the correct person and place, it can take a lot of time. The specifics matter when your end result is creating maps that bring all this information together in a tangible way.”

Together, the Data Lab team worked with Tim and his team to clean up information in order to create the maps they needed to know which providers were in which location at any given time. and were able to smooth out the process for them and save valuable time for everyone. When asked about the impact the Data Lab’s partnership had on their organization, Tim was resolute. “Could my team and I have made this fly? Yes. Could we have made it fly as elegantly and quickly? No way.” In the end, the Data Lab and Delaware Health Force published an interactive report that mapped out the distribution of Delaware’s healthcare workforce against the needs of the population across the state. The award-winning project and deep partnership between the two organizations continue today with additional work developing triage systems for primary care to help ease the burden of provider shortage in Delaware.

When asked what’s next for Delaware Health Force and Tech Impact’s Data Lab, Tim was excited to share that they are diving even deeper into other specialties to make even more granular maps. When complete, their report will help map every specialty and the care they provide to Delaware residents to display on a map that better shows healthcare deserts and where true shortages lie. Tim is excited for what’s to come and sees data as something other than just numbers on a page. “Data is a living thing, and a little like a dragon from the movie How to Train Your Dragon. People think data is something you need to beat into submission when in reality, it just needs to be tamed in order to become your partner and facilitator for your organization.”

“The Data Lab team does an excellent job of helping my team to tame that dragon and make the experience enjoyable for everyone involved. Their courage to take on complex challenges that other groups may shy away from gives us tremendous admiration for all that they do to advance social impact.”