On Tuesday, June 11, the Bowen Center for Health Workforce Research & Policy, IU School of Medicine, performed a live demonstration of the Bowen Health Workforce Portal at the Indiana Government Center prior to the Governor’s Health Workforce Council meeting.  The presentation showed how to use the portal and learn how its features might benefit them or their organization. The team also gathered in-person feedback on the portal’s latest feature: Health Workforce Trends Visualization.

The Polis Center, in partnership with the Bowen Center for Health Workforce Research & Policy and with IU School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics, developed this online information sharing and mapping platform for Bowen in 2017.  The portal allows users the flexibility of accessing their information offsite and readily discover, map, and share health workforce data, including data about Indiana’s workforce supply and distribution, shortages, and education pipeline. These processes and tools enable Bowen staff to take the primary role in developing the map content to be presented within their portal.

Polis subsequently developed a Report Generator tool for the Bowen Portal, which allows users to create customized one-page reports about Indiana’s health workforce, and most recently finished the trends visualization. The new trend visualization feature was unveiled May 21 at the  Indiana Health Workforce Summit. The tool allows users to view trends across health workforce indicators for the overall state as well as for each of Indiana’s 92 counties for each of its economic group regions, area health education center regions, and public health preparedness districts.

“This is a very cool opportunity for Bowen to share this tool with an important audience,” said Karen Comer, Polis Director, Collaborative Research and Health Geoinformatics. “It is also a wonderful example of how Polis has built the capacity of our partners to use maps and spatial information meaningfully.”