The Iowa Health Professions Inventory (IHPI), contains demographic, educational, and professional information for over 11, 000 actively practicing Iowa health care providers. The inventory characterizes the health care workforce (e.g., age, gender, and worksite), monitors trends, and facilitates research on the state’s health care workforce. Its benchmarking capacity enables users to track changes in supply and geographic distribution over time. The tracking system is monitored and updated on a continuous basis, incorporating changes in the workforce due to deaths, retirements, relocations, and new practitioners entering practice.

IHPI enables users to chart specific trends, forecast changes in the state’s health professions workforce, characterize the workforce demographically and gauge the return on the state’s investments in health professions education. 

Advisory committees for pharmacists, dentists, advanced registered nurse practitioners, and physician assistants were established to guide the development of their respective health professions tracking system. The advisory committees were essential to the initial design and development of the tracking systems. They continue to play an important role in reviewing the data and supporting the user guidelines and policies.