The COVID-19 pandemic brought the value and vulnerability of those serving the nation’s long-term care system into sharp relief. Direct-care workers, such as personal care and home health aides, were recognized as heroes as they performed the essential — and often dangerous — task of keeping older adults and people with disabilities safe and well cared for. Yet, even before the pandemic, the precarious state of this workforce was acutely clear, with low pay, difficulty recruiting and retaining workers, and a lack of standardized training and credentialing undermining the quality of care as well as workforce mobility and stability.
As the population of Americans 65 and older increases, states are struggling with the sizable difference between the number of individuals who qualify for Medicaid-financed long-term services and supports (LTSS) and the number of workers available to provide this care. These workforce shortages hinder a state’s ability to rebalance its Medicaid population — by either transitioning individuals from nursing homes and assisted living facilities or prolonging their residence in the community — through the provision of essential home and community-based services (HCBS). Existing solutions being proposed to help states enhance recruitment, retention, and development strategies are often limited in their ability to understand real-time gaps and needs.
To overcome these constraints to addressing workforce shortages, Altarum partnered with ADvancing States to develop a comprehensive Direct Care Careers Center workforce management tool. The platform provides everything states need in a single workforce management tool: training and professional development resources, credentialing, job matching, peer support, and meaningful real-time data to guide planning and policymaking.
Using the Direct Care Careers Center platform, individual states are able to:
- Understand their state’s current workforce by enabling a state-wide system
- Streamline the recruitment process among providers, individuals who direct their own care, and prospective workers by automatically matching talent bank profiles with job descriptions
- Provide access to training and professional development resources, including required state certification training(s) through the learning platform
- Build peer-to-peer support among workers through a collaboration forum
- Better manage their workforce and inform state workforce priorities through real-time data analytics and workforce dashboards
Drawing on more than a decade of experience developing and maintaining online resource and virtual training centers for clients such as CMS and HRSA, Altarum developed the Direct Care Careers Center to allow extensive customization for different audiences and devices in order to meet state, employer, and worker needs. Among the center’s many features are tools for job postings, advanced search capabilities for job seekers, simple online applications, training modules, discussion forums, and one-stop credentialing and licensure management.