It's four weeks before the project launch. Despite their hastily assembled office quarters, digital librarians are working with the precision and speed of an Indy 500 pit crew, steadily tagging, coding and adding information to “the database.” Web and design experts have been laboring for weeks over how to organize “the database’s” massive amounts of information into a website that is easy to navigate. A cross-country communications team has been strategizing promotion of this new project, including the biggest national press conference they’ve ever worked on. And one soft-spoken, red-headed leader is orchestrating every strategic move.
    This is a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to launch the Health Workforce Information Center – the nation’s first online clearinghouse for information and resources related to health workforce professions and industry.

Seeing the need
    This story actually begins seven months earlier in June 2008, when Kristine Sande, MBA, a project director at the University of North Dakota medical school’s Center for Rural Health, Grand Forks, was browsing grants.gov for funding opportunities.
    “I ran across a posting from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), looking for someone to produce a digital library on health workforce information, and knew we were the right team for the job,” said Sande. “We created a similar online resource six years ago – the Rural Assistance Center – that has received over three million Web visits and has a strong reputation nationally for being ‘the place to go.’”
    While much of the nation is experiencing a lack of job openings, health care job vacancies are at crisis levels. With critical shortages of physicians, nurses and allied health personnel, solutions to address the vacancies can come none too soon.
    “We were looking for a way to more easily provide the wealth of valuable workforce information out there to health leaders across the country,” said Elizabeth Duke, PhD, former HRSA administrator. “We thought that having the information in one easy-to-access resource would save them time and help them find things like educational programs and ways to retain health workers and ultimately increase and maintain staffing.” 
    Four weeks after finding the grant opportunity, a swiftly-pulled-together team of experts, and one 80-page grant proposal later, the team waited, if somewhat impatiently, for a response. It arrived two months later: HRSA had selected the Center for Rural Health from a very competitive pool of applicants to establish the Health Workforce Information Center (HWIC).
    The North Dakota team flew into a flurry of activity, adding seven staff members to help support the $3.75 million endeavor and effectively outgrowing the Center’s fourth-floor home at the UND medical school. With meticulous planning and an aggressive production schedule, the project was slated to launch February 5, 2009.