This book provides a detailed guide to the highly specialised but little known health information workforce - people who are health informaticians, digital health experts, and managers of health data, health information and health knowledge. It explains the basis of their unique functions within healthcare – their educational pathways and standards, professional qualifications and industry certifications, scholarly foundations and principles of good practice. It explores their challenges, including the rise of the health consumer movement, the drive to improve equity and quality in healthcare, new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and the COVID-19 infodemic. Case studies describe how practitioners in real-world roles around the world are addressing the digital transformation of health. The Health Information Workforce: Current and Future Developments offers insights into a skilled group of people who are essential for healthcare services to function, for care providers to practice at the top of their scope, for researchers to generate significant insights, and for care consumers to be empowered participants in health systems. This book offers new perspectives for anyone working or intending to work in the health sector. It is a critical resource for health workforce planners, employers and educators seeking guidance on the specialised capabilities needed for high performance in an increasingly information-intensive sector.

By 2030, the world will be short of approximately 15 million health workers - a fifth of the workforce needed to keep healthcare systems going. Global healthcare leader and award-winning author, Dr Mark Britnell, uses his unique insights from advising governments, executives, and clinicians in more than 70 countries, to present solutions to this impending crisis. Human: Solving the Global Workforce Crisis in Healthcare, calls for a reframing of the global debate about health and national wealth, and invites us to deal with this problem in new and adaptive ways that drive economic and human prosperity. Harnessing technology, it asks us to reimagine new models of care and levels of workforce agility. Drawing on experiences ranging from the world's most advanced hospitals to revolutionary new approaches in India and Africa, Dr Mark Britnell makes it clear what works - and what does not. Short and concise, this book gives a truly global perspective on the fundamental workforce issues facing health systems today.

Many of the elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect in 2014, and with the establishment of many new rules and regulations, there will continue to be significant changes to the United States health care system. It is not clear what impact these changes will have on medical and public health preparedness programs around the country. Although there has been tremendous progress since 2005 and Hurricane Katrina, there is still a long way to go to ensure the health security of the Country. There is a commonly held notion that preparedness is separate and distinct from everyday operations, and that it only affects emergency departments. But time and time again, catastrophic events challenge the entire health care system, from acute care and emergency medical services down to the public health and community clinic level, and the lack of preparedness of one part of the system places preventable stress on other components. The implementation of the ACA provides the opportunity to consider how to incorporate preparedness into all aspects of the health care system. The Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Preparedness Resources and Programs is the summary of a workshop convened by the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events in November 2013 to discuss how changes to the health system as a result of the ACA might impact medical and public health preparedness programs across the nation. This report discusses challenges and benefits of the Affordable Care Act to disaster preparedness and response efforts around the country and considers how changes to payment and reimbursement models will present opportunities and challenges to strengthen disaster preparedness and response capacities.

This document provides a standard-based tool for health workforce planners and decision-makers developing an electronic system or modifying an existing health information system to count and document all health workers within national and subnational contexts. The minimum data set for health workforce registry provided in this document can be used by ministries of health to support the development of standardized health workforce information systems. The minimum data set allows standardization of data values within existing electronic human resources for health (HRH) information systems. When used appropriately by information systems designers and software developers, a functional electronic health workforce registry can be designed to enable health workforce data interoperability, i.e. the ability to exchange health workforce data between software applications and computer systems within broader sub-national or national health information systems. Through this approach, rapid aggregation and display of health workforce data for decision-making can be fully realized.

The United States is rapidly transforming into one of the most racially and ethnically diverse nations in the world. Groups commonly referred to as minorities-including Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and Alaska Natives-are the fastest growing segments of the population and emerging as the nation's majority. Despite the rapid growth of racial and ethnic minority groups, their representation among the nation's health professionals has grown only modestly in the past 25 years. This alarming disparity has prompted the recent creation of initiatives to increase diversity in health professions. In the Nation's Compelling Interest considers the benefits of greater racial and ethnic diversity, and identifies institutional and policy-level mechanisms to garner broad support among health professions leaders, community members, and other key stakeholders to implement these strategies. Assessing the potential benefits of greater racial and ethnic diversity among health professionals will improve the access to and quality of healthcare for all Americans.

'The Healthcare Professional Workforce' is the first book to codify the transformations underway across health professions in the U.S. and to situate these changes within a larger context for both healthcare and non-healthcare audiences.

With nearly half of the world's population living in a rural or remote area, meeting the health needs of rural populations, where over 80% of the world's extremely poor live, is imperative in achieving universal health coverage. Leaving no one behind means ensuring that health workers are available in rural and remote areas. Health, social and economic inequities remain cross-cutting challenges for rural populations. Rural populations tend to be poorer, have worse health outcomes, and experience higher rates of unemployment, underemployment and informal employment. It is estimated that about 51-67% of rural populations are without adequate access to essential health services , translating to about 2 billion people being left behind. In some countries, rural populations have access to numbers of health workers that are 10 times less than the numbers available to urban populations. The deficiency in numbers and mix of trained motivated health workers to provide the needed health services is a critical health system issue. This inequitable access to health workers and health services impacts health outcomes and increases socioeconomic disadvantages. Higher under-5, maternal and preventable mortality rates, increased morbidity, decreased life expectancy, and more costs to access distant care are seen across rural areas.