Becker's Hospital Review

October-2023-issue-of-beckers-hospital

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38 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING EXECUTIVE BRIEFING 1 SPONSORED BY The workforce strategy imperative: How to ensure your largest expense is also your greatest asset I n the wake of the pandemic, healthcare leaders were compelled to implement innovative and resilient solutions to support their teams in caring for patients. While these quick fixes served their purpose during the crisis, they weren't designed for the long term. With the conclusion of the public health emergency, healthcare executives must now focus on rebuilding their workforces strategically, emphasizing both organizational flexibility and cost containment. To better understand the types of holistic workforce solutions health systems are implementing, Becker's Hospital Review recently spoke with three leaders from AMN Healthcare — Meredith Lapointe, Chief Business Officer; Pat McCall, Chief Growth Officer; and Will Morse, Corporate Vice President of Solution Design & Implementation. The Current Landscape of the Healthcare Workforce The healthcare workforce is grappling with unprecedented staffing shortages, fierce competition for talent, high turnover rates, and escalating costs. A healthy workforce is pivotal for delivering high-quality, sustainable care. It encompasses well- prepared and confident professionals, appropriate staffing levels, flexibility, and adequate training. But the aftermath of the pandemic paints a bleak picture about the current health of the healthcare workforce: • Around 30% of nurses are considering leaving their careers. • Nurse career satisfaction plummeted from 80-85% to 71% in 2023. • Over 90% of nurses acknowledge severe or moderate shortages in their areas. (Source: 2023 AMN Healthcare Survey of Registered Nurses: The Pandemic's Consequences) A Holistic, Strategic Approach to Talent In the past, healthcare organizations managed talent in silos, exacerbating the challenges of talent planning, acquisition, and deployment. A more effective approach involves adopting a holistic, multi-dimensional perspective on workforce management. This approach entails evaluating required skills across the enterprise, anticipating when, where, and how these skills will be needed, and then efficiently managing talent scheduling to ensure that people with the right skills are available in the right numbers, at the right locations, as needed. Rather than isolated management, adopting an enterprise-level strategy and focusing on a holistic talent ecosystem increases flexibility by managing talent at scale across the entire organization. Strategic Staffing Partnerships To navigate the challenges in talent management, collaborating with the right strategic staffing partner is invaluable. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to effective workforce management. Ideal workforce management technology and staffing partners understand an organization's position, challenges, capabilities, and talent management maturity. They extend the organization's talent acquisition function by offering expertise, additional capacity, diverse staffing models, and access to broader talent pools, including contingent workers. One effective solution is creating a staffing office leveraging technology that connects core labor in addition to flexible pools such as float pools/internal resource pools, travelers, and per diem deployment. These solutions enable flexibility to meet demand, as well as create advancement and internal opportunities that can improve retention and best practice sharing. The Role of Innovative Technologies Innovation is underway to address key workforce challenges, particularly in labor forecasting, recruitment, retention, and enterprise-level business intelligence that provides executives with data to drive key talent decisions. Technology innovation revolves around three primary aspects of workforce management: 1. Talent Planning: Robust analytics that use patient demand data are able to precisely forecast staffing needs. This includes core staff, internal agency pools, and external flexible staffing. Forecasting and optimization technology platforms that enable data-driven staffing decisions are now essential and are crucial to proactively scheduling resources, delivering better labor cost management, and improving employee alignment and satisfaction. 2. Talent Acquisition: Technology that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) can now rapidly identify and match qualified candidates for specific jobs, based on the role's requirements and the candidate's skills and experience. This significantly accelerates the hiring process, effectively engages qualified candidates, and allows health systems to tap into "gig-worker" candidate pools.

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