Healthcare Conference Tackles Drug Shortages, Social Media Trends, and Nursing Home Care Challenges

The annual Midwest Healthcare Management Conference, co-hosted by Carle Illinois College of Medicine and Gies College of Business continues to address some of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry. Below are some of the hot topics presented at the conference.

Solving drug supply shortages in rural areas

Ujjal Mukherjee, a Health Innovation Professor at CI MED and an associate professor of business administration at Gies Business, is leading an effort to address drug shortages, particularly in rural settings.  His team is mapping the pharmaceutical supply chain to understand the supplier network and the interdependency of different suppliers and organizations. 

“We do feel the network helps, but it can also increase the duration of the shortage,” Mukherjee said. “It’s a dense network, and businesses are interdependent, so if there is any disruption in any of the focal dense nodes, then it can actually propagate much faster in the network.”

The study, which is in its early stages and includes researchers from the University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, seeks to determine which network structure is more vulnerable to shortages. 

“They happen, but we want to determine how fast we can recover from them,” Mukherjee said.

The team analyzed different streams of data to understand how the network structure affected the supply chain. 

“The globalization of the pharmaceutical industry relates to quality issues, but there is always a trade-off,” Mukherjee said. “On the one hand, it reduces the cost and increases the availability, but the same kind of practices the FDA uses to monitor drug delivery are difficult to replicate in the non-development markets.” 

Mukherjee, whose primary research is in rural healthcare delivery to underserved communities, like those in China and India, has had precursor studies published in the Journal of Operations Management and has presented similar studies to the US Senate.

Well-Being and Social Media

There is growing concern that increased social media use and the advancement of AI could have a negative effect on well-being. However, Koustuv Saha, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois’ Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, has found that social media can have a positive effect in many cases.. 

He is using human-centered AI techniques to study the social science problems of people’s health and well-being.” Saha's research found that people who shared bad news on social media, such as being fired from a job, healed more readily than those who chose not to share these unfortunate life events.

Saha’s team aims to work with social media companies to build design interventions and better understand users' needs on their platforms.

Addressing shortages of nursing home workers

As demographics in the United States continue to skew older, nursing homes are facing persistent staffing shortages, particularly among nurses’ aides, who provide between 70 and 80 percent of the direct care to residents. These positions face high turnover and are often underpaid.

Federal regulations allow nurse aides four months to complete all required training and certification after a nursing home hires them. However, because of staffing and training disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, those requirements were temporarily relaxed nationwide in an effort to keep nursing homes fully staffed. 

On June 7, 2022, the United States ended the COVID-19 emergency blanket waiver for temporary nurse aides (TNA), reinstating the four-month certification requirement. However, some states have continued to extend it because of a backlog in training and certification testing, allowing additional time to complete the 75 hours of training required to earn certified nursing assistant (CNA) status.

Minyu Ye (right), a PhD candidate in Gies College of Business, is studying the effects of these decisions by comparing results from states that have relaxed the time to certification (18 states) and those that have reimplemented the four-month requirement.

Providing daily hands-on care for residents is a major duty of nurse aides. Ye’s study found that states that continue to employ more TNAs because of extended certification timelines experienced an increase in urinary tract infections among residents. The study also found an increase in the use of urinary catheters among residents in those states.

This leaves health officials facing the dilemma of balancing quality resident care with the need to fill open positions.

Editor's note: Read the original version of this article by Mike Koon on the Gies College of Business website.