Matching Allied Health Student Need with Supply: Description of a New Index

Hospitals often depend on rotating students to fulfill their educational missions, meet clinical needs, and develop a pipeline for workforce needs. Strategies to match clinical rotations offered with the hospital's hiring needs are often haphazard or even overlooked. This report proposes a new index--the HOT Index (for "Hired, Open, Trained")--to help match training with hiring of allied health students in academic medical centers. The index values generated range from 0 to 1, depending on the degree of alignment among the three variables considered. To evaluate performance of the index, data were compiled for health sciences clinical education rotations offered in three professions in the years 2017 to 2019 and for three more professions in 2019 alone. The index was assessed by application in scenarios with varying degree of mismatch among the variables of training provided, open positions, and students hired. Analysis of several professions over time confirmed the responsiveness of the HOT Index to fluctuating conditions. Based on preliminary analysis of its performance, the HOT Index appears to be responsive to matching of training and hiring in allied health programs, thereby enhancing sustainability and efficiency of allied health clinical training programs in academic medical centers.