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Andrew M. Dierkes
PhD, RN
Assistant Professor
Acute & Tertiary Care
Profile
Dr. Dierkes’ research focuses on optimizing the nation’s largest healthcare workforce—nurses—to enhance patient care, improve employee well-being, and reduce healthcare costs. His work has examined a range of critical healthcare challenges, including sepsis care and outcomes, Pay for Performance (P4P) programs, California’s nurse staffing mandate, and nurse unions. His clinical background as an inpatient adult medical-surgical nurse provides firsthand insight into the realities of bedside care and workforce challenges, informing his research.
Dr. Dierkes also directs the Health Services and Policy Research Hub, a collaborative initiative dedicated to advancing policy research, education, and impact.
Scholarly Emphasis
Dr. Dierkes studies the role of bedside nurses and their assistive personnel in hospitals, focusing on their well-being, clinical impact, and efficient resource utilization. His research program centers on predictive modeling to optimize nurse-patient assignments (NPAs), developing data-driven algorithms to help hospitals allocate nursing resources more effectively within staffing constraints.
To advance this work, he has curated one of the largest shift-level datasets of its kind, tracking millions of NPAs across multiple hospitals. This dataset captures individual-level attributes and outcomes for nurses, aides, and patients, providing a critical resource for workforce research, intervention development, and evaluation.
Dr. Dierkes welcomes collaboration with students, researchers, and healthcare organizations interested in data-driven workforce solutions. His research group and the Hub actively engage in projects that bridge health services research, workforce policy, and hospital operations to improve patient care and nursing outcomes.
Teaching
Dr. Dierkes is the primary faculty member for NUR 1212: Introduction to Healthcare Finance and Policy and assists with the graduate course NUR 3012: Public Policy in Health Care. He provides guest lectures on topics including health systems and financing, public policy, and workforce research.
Service
Dr. Dierkes volunteers as a registered nurse at the Catholic Charities Free Health Care Clinic in downtown Pittsburgh.