Reshaping the Future of Healthcare Talent in Michigan
Madaline Puma
Miriam Glassman
The United States healthcare system is in critical condition. States are under immense pressure to identify innovative solutions that mitigate longer-term workforce changes, and in Michigan, these solutions are driven by the Michigan Health Council.
Michigan Health Council (MHC) is a nonprofit with an eight-decade legacy of developing programs and services to address key issues in Michigan's healthcare sector. Their research identifies gaps and inconsistencies in the Michigan healthcare system, ultimately targeting initiatives that build workforce capacity.
Michigan’s healthcare organizations and decision-makers have relied on MHC as their source of workforce research through this challenging time, leading to the production of new, notable research projects: an annual healthcare workforce index, career navigation tools, and a statewide healthcare workforce plan.
How were they able to accomplish all of this in just a few years?
They started with Lightcast.
Overview:
MHC is Michigan's leading source of healthcare workforce data and research. The nonprofit provides stakeholders and organizations with accessible, in-depth data about the state of their healthcare workforce.
Developer, a Lightcast tool, gave MHC access to statewide labor market insights and economic analysis tools. It was a key resource for their first-ever Michigan Healthcare Workforce Index, a detailed report of healthcare job stability across the state.
After producing its first Michigan Healthcare Workforce Index (Index), MHC has continued with annual research projects to assess the healthcare workforce, culminating in a statewide plan.
Read below to discover how MHC utilized Lightcast data in their Index, leading to new initiatives and concrete changes in the workforce.
The Challenge: Assessing Michigan’s Healthcare Workforce in an Unpredictable Time
To create an actionable healthcare workforce plan for their state, MHC needed an up-to-date, shared understanding of the labor market.
Although they had experience addressing issues within specific organizations and working to bolster solutions for gaps in the healthcare workforce, a future-oriented state plan required massive amounts of predictive, in-depth labor market data—and in 2021, they didn’t even have a research department.
The Solution: Personalized, Predictive Labor Market Data with Lightcast’s Developer
To launch its research department, MHC hired Michelle Wein as the Senior Director of Research. “I knew we needed a labor market data provider," said Michelle. “I’d used Lightcast in my previous role, so I was already familiar with the quality of the data, and we thought the interface was excellent. After presenting Lightcast to leadership and seeing the demo, we started using it right away and haven’t looked back.”
With the support of Lightcast data, MHC developed the Michigan Healthcare Workforce Index, a comprehensive report ranking the “health” of 36 healthcare occupations and occupational categories based on exposure to shortages, turnover, wage changes, and more. Now, Michigan's decision-makers have easy access to data on the state of individual occupations and the collective healthcare workforce.
A core component of the Index is Lightcast’s Developer tool: “The Index is very heavily reliant on Lightcast data,” shared Michelle. “It’s how we pull information on all the factors we use to rank the healthcare occupations.” Developer gave MHC access to personalized job data, which allowed them to customize their findings in many key ways:
Access to location-specific metrics: MHC needed occupation data across a range of locations, aiming to pull information on county, regional, and state levels. With Developer, all of this information was at their fingertips, including data about both current and projected workforce shortages.
Contextualized demographic data: A crucial component of MHC’s mission is to build healthcare workforce capacity. With Lightcast, they had easy access to social identifiers and demographic information within the healthcare workforce through Developer, allowing them to capture occupational and wage differences by race, sex, and more.
Identifying and categorizing unique occupations: In healthcare, SOC (Standard Occupation Classification) codes are used as a standardized job classification system. However, entry-level, stepping-stone positions are hard to define within these limited categories. Developer job posting data helps MHC overcome these limitations, offering occupation and wage information for positions beyond the SOC code scope. While these pages cover occupations with defined SOC codes, many common healthcare roles that serve as stepping stones into the field don’t have formal SOC classifications and are therefore harder to categorize.
Lightcast data was crucial to the creation of the Index—it became a key resource for healthcare decision-makers and led to many more research initiatives for MHC.
Results: Growth, Insights, and A New Statewide Plan
Following the major success of the first Index, MHC produces a new Index every year, keeping the state and decision-makers informed about changes in the healthcare workforce. To keep up with the demand, MHC’s research department, MHC Insight, has quadrupled in size, becoming a crucial asset to the organization.
This initial project has also led to fulfilling a long-time goal of MHC releasing a statewide healthcare workforce plan. Outlining evolving healthcare sector challenges and suggestions for long-term solutions, the 2025 Michigan Healthcare Workforce Plan “really was the end result of all of the research we've been doing with the Index,” said Michelle.
Over just four years, MHC has created multiple indexes, a larger statewide plan, and updated its other initiatives and occupational resources. With all of this research and labor market data, they’re ready to tackle larger think pieces, hoping to expand their perspective to projected healthcare workforce changes across the entire Midwest.
The Real Impact: Changes in Education, Business, and Job Availability
The larger-scale projects completed by MHC ultimately aim to impact the everyday lives of Michigan residents and healthcare workers. Changes have already been seen through this research in multiple key ways:
Expanding job access for nurses in the Midwest: Michigan has previously not been part of the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) agreement, which allows nurses to work across state lines without needing additional licenses. Using Lightcast workforce data, MHC conducted an impact evaluation to determine if participation in the NLC could open up job opportunities for nurses in the state.
Career guidance for students entering the healthcare sector: MHC’s “Occupation Pages” provide key labor market data from Lightcast—such as hourly wages, top posted job titles, and projected ten-year job growth—for 35 specific healthcare careers. While these pages mostly cover occupations with defined SOC codes, some do not. MHC began developing more in-depth Career Navigator Guides for these non-categorized occupations, which offer additional context and guidance. While not every occupation currently has a guide, the occupation pages and the navigator guides are essential tools for students exploring healthcare careers.
Increasing job applicants by closing business wage gaps: In this small but real-world example of practical data impacts, a Michigan dentist's office raised their dental assistant salary based on median wage data in the Index—and saw an increase in job applications. Dental assistants are the “unhealthiest” occupation in the Index, but by implementing data from the Index, this hard-to-fill position suddenly became competitive.
The impact of these initiatives is felt on every level, supporting individual careers, larger companies, and statewide policy. As a result, MHC is reshaping the state’s healthcare sector, with newer projects expanding across the country—and it all started with a pivotal first decision to partner with Lightcast.
