This bill amends Section 2105-368 of Illinois law to expand the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation's data collection tied to health care professional licensure applications and renewals. It directs DFPR to ask applicants for demographic data and to require practice-related fields from health care licensees, then share the collected practice information with the Department of Public Health while carving that data out of FOIA.
The measure also commands DFPR to publish an annual deidentified, aggregate report each March summarizing demographic counts, application and renewal volumes, and the number of applicants denied licensure in the prior calendar year. The change is designed to produce state-level workforce and regulatory intelligence while creating a statutory privacy shield for the collected practice data — a combination with clear operational and transparency trade-offs for regulators, licensees, and data users.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill amends the Department of Professional Regulation Law to add required practice fields for applicants seeking health care professional licensure or renewal, and to permit DFPR to share that practice data with authorized staff at the Illinois Department of Public Health. It also makes the practice data collected under the new subsection exempt from the Illinois Freedom of Information Act and requires DFPR to post an annual aggregate report.
Who It Affects
Individuals applying for or renewing licenses under a long list of health professions (see statutory list) will need to supply practice-location details, direct outpatient hours by site, their NPI if they have one, and an anticipated retirement date. DFPR and IDPH will receive and manage new data feeds; researchers and workforce planners will gain an annual aggregate dataset but will lose access to the underlying identifiable records.
Why It Matters
States and agencies typically struggle to map clinician supply and distribution; this bill centralizes practice-level inputs for planning and oversight while limiting public access to raw records. That combination changes how regulators, public-health planners, and transparency advocates can use licensure data.
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What This Bill Actually Does
Section 2105-368 already directed DFPR to collect some demographic information on license applications; this bill keeps that voluntary demographic line but creates a separate, mandatory practice-information stream specifically for "health care professionals." For those license types, DFPR must collect practice specialties, addresses of every current practice site, and the number of hours the applicant spends at each location on direct outpatient care. It also requires applicants to provide an NPI if they have one and an anticipated retirement date.
The bill establishes a direct data-sharing path from DFPR to authorized personnel at the Illinois Department of Public Health. The text does not enumerate permitted analytic uses beyond the sharing authorization; instead it pairs that sharing with a statutory FOIA exemption for the data collected under the new practice-information subsection, meaning those raw records are off-limits to public FOIA requests.DFPR must also publish, on or before March 1 each year, an aggregate report covering the prior calendar year.
That report must contain aggregate demographic counts (from the voluntary demographic questions), the number of licensure applications and renewals received, and the number of applicants denied licensure in the prior year. The statute explicitly prohibits publishing any data that would identify a health care professional, so the public report is limited to deidentified, aggregated metrics.The bill defines which professions fall within "health care professional" for this collection — a specific list of licensing Acts including physicians, nurses, psychologists, physical therapists, physician assistants, social workers, counselors, and allied professions such as audiologists and speech-language pathologists.
That definition ties the new requirements to an established set of license types rather than to a generic regulatory category.Operationally, license applicants and renewals will need to provide up-to-date practice addresses and site-specific outpatient-hour estimates, and DFPR will need processes to receive, validate, store, and share that data with IDPH while applying the FOIA exemption and preparing an annual aggregate report. The statute leaves implementation details — data formats, security controls, retention periods, and enforcement for inaccurate self-reports — to agency rulemaking or administrative practice.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill makes data collected under the new practice-information subsection explicitly exempt from the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
DFPR must collect site-level practice addresses and the number of hours spent at each site on direct outpatient care from applicants for specified health care licenses.
Applicants must provide their National Provider Identifier (NPI) “if applicable” and an anticipated date of retirement.
DFPR must publish an aggregate, deidentified report on its website on or before March 1 each year covering the prior calendar year.
The statute lists the licensing Acts covered — for example, the Medical Practice Act of 1987, Nurse Practice Act, Physician Assistant Practice Act, Clinical Psychologist Licensing Act, Physical Therapy Act, and others — and ties the new requirements to those Acts.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Voluntary demographic data collection
This subsection retains and clarifies DFPR's authority to request voluntary demographic fields on licensure applications: sex, race, ethnicity, disability, primary language, anticipated retirement date, type of employment, and zip code. Because the statute labels these items as voluntary, applicants can refuse to provide them, which affects the completeness of any demographic analysis DFPR or IDPH might attempt. Agencies will need to track response rates and decide whether to weight or otherwise adjust aggregate outputs for nonresponse.
Mandatory practice-information fields for health care licenses and sharing with IDPH
This is the operative change: for the defined set of "health care professionals," DFPR must require applicants to provide areas of specialty, addresses of all current practice locations, hours at each site on direct outpatient care, NPI if applicable, and an anticipated retirement date. The subsection also authorizes DFPR to share that practice information with authorized personnel at the Illinois Department of Public Health. Importantly, the statute couples that sharing with an express FOIA exemption for data specifically collected under this subsection, restricting external access to the underlying records.
Annual aggregate reporting and deidentification requirement
DFPR must publish an annual report by March 1 that aggregates demographic data collected under subsection (a), counts of licensure applications and renewals received in the prior calendar year, and the number of applicants denied licensure in that year (with language that counts denials regardless of when the underlying application was initially filed). The statute prohibits publishing any information that would identify an individual health care professional, so the report is limited to aggregate metrics and removes or suppresses granular location or identifying fields.
Definition of 'health care professional' — scope of coverage
The bill defines 'health care professional' by cross-reference to a specific list of licensing Acts (Medical Practice Act of 1987; Nurse Practice Act; Clinical Psychologist Licensing Act; Illinois Optometric Practice Act; Physical Therapy Act; Physician Assistant Practice Act; Clinical Social Work and Social Work Practice Act; Nursing Home Administrators Act; Occupational Therapy Practice Act; Podiatric Medical Practice Act; Respiratory Care Practice Act; Professional Counselor Acts; Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Act). Tying the requirement to these Acts narrows the obligation to established license types and avoids an open-ended professional definition, but it also requires agencies to map each license class to the new data fields.
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Explore Healthcare in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Illinois Department of Public Health — gains direct access to practice-level data to inform workforce planning, distribution analysis, and emergency response capacity estimates without having to assemble similar datasets from other sources.
- State health planners and policy makers — receive an annual, standardized aggregate dataset to support decisions on training capacity, licensure policy, and localized access-to-care interventions.
- Regulators at DFPR — obtain richer operational data to detect practice-pattern anomalies, manage licensure enforcement, and monitor retirement timing that affects supply forecasting.
- Health workforce researchers and internal state analysts — stand to get better, standardized inputs for modeling clinician supply and geographic distribution through the aggregated reports.
Who Bears the Cost
- Department of Financial and Professional Regulation — must build or modify application systems, validate site-level address and hours data, implement secure sharing to IDPH, and produce annual aggregate reports (costs in IT, staffing, and data governance).
- License applicants (individual clinicians) — must provide more detailed practice information, including site-by-site hours, which increases reporting burden and raises privacy concerns for clinicians with multiple practice locations.
- Employers and practice sites — may face indirect compliance costs if clinicians must supply employer-specific hours and addresses, and they may need to reconcile employer records with self-reported data.
- Public FOIA requesters and transparency advocates — lose access to the underlying practice records because of the statute’s FOIA exemption, reducing external oversight and third-party data verification capabilities.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is choosing between granular, actionable workforce data for regulators and planners and preserving clinician privacy and public transparency: the bill delivers richer data to state agencies but removes raw records from public scrutiny, so it solves one set of problems (data scarcity for planning) while creating another (reduced transparency and potential privacy risks).
The bill creates a useful central dataset for workforce and regulatory purposes but leaves key implementation details unspecified. It does not set standards for data accuracy, verification, or how often applicants must update practice-location information after initial licensure.
That absence raises enforcement questions: will DFPR rely on self-attestation, random audits, or employer verification, and who bears the cost of any auditing?
The statutory FOIA exemption narrows public access to the underlying records and shifts the state’s transparency balance. While aggregation can protect privacy, heavy deidentification reduces the ability of independent researchers and journalists to validate state analyses or to detect local shortages.
The statute also authorizes sharing with IDPH but does not define permitted use cases, retention schedules, or security standards, and it does not address potential overlaps with federal privacy law (for example, HIPAA) where practice-level data might intersect with patient-level systems. Finally, the language counting denials “regardless of whether application was made in that calendar year” could produce confusing metrics if DFPR is resolving older pending matters and may require agencies to publish methodological notes to make the annual report interpretable.
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