Six Ways Technology Can Help Cure What’s Ailing Healthcare Organizations

Automating processes can help employers improve compliance, address skill and leadership gaps, and create common processes across dispersed health systems  

Healthcare providers are up against it today. Critical challenges include compliance (Joint Commission audits, HIPAA), industry consolidation (expansion can be very tricky), and competition for talent (always a factor). Add them all up, and it’s pretty daunting.

Briefly stated, healthcare employers must:

• Deal with tighter, less-predictable regulatory processes 

• Address talent shortages in crucial areas

• Identify and develop tomorrow’s leaders

• Navigate industry consolidation

When you factor in today’s rough economic climate, success becomes even more elusive. So what’s a healthcare industry employer to do?

One strategy is to enhance their people management strategies by investing in a talent management technology solution and automating key processes that are manual and paper-based. Why?  For one, it will enable healthcare organizations to improve compliance and address gaps in skills and leadership, as well as to create common processes that can bring together even the largest and most dispersed health systems.

Here are six ways that learning and talent management software can help healthcare organizations tackle the challenges they’re facing.  

1.  Competencies

Joint Commission requirements that make it critical to manage up-to-date clinical job descriptions – both at time of hire and on the job. This is far easier when the job descriptions are built on a foundation of detailed clinical competencies. With the right technology, an organization can create job descriptions, competencies, job profiles and learning resources for hundreds of common jobs, as well as facilitate assessments and feedback from peers, direct reports and supervisors.

2. Enterprise Learning

The ability to deliver high-quality learning can enable superior patient care, heighten patient satisfaction, increase patient safety and improve the ability to comply with standards for accreditation. A learning management system (LMS) can also make it far easier to deliver, administer and track many forms of employee training – including online, instructor-led and virtual instruction. Features such as flash graphics, video and single sign-on access can improve the user experience and drive user adoption. Then, administrators and managers can easily monitor employee progress toward completion can reduce compliance risks.

3. Onboarding

Effective onboarding of new hires is about more than the cost savings that comes from automating completion of necessary paperwork. Onboarding done right can identify areas for development and decrease a new employee’s time to productivity. It can also create a great employee experience from the start and boost retention. According to Aberdeen Group research, managers reported that 90 percent of employees decide within their first six months on the job whether to stay at an employer. A strong onboarding process makes this crucial period less stressful for the new employee and the manager, as well as minimizing disruption to organization and patients.

4. Performance Management

In a high-pressure clinical environment, finding the time to provide performance feedback is difficult. Yet, higher performance often means better patient care. Automating time-consuming manual or paper-based performance appraisal processes and delivering high-quality employee appraisals that meet accreditation requirements are valuable parts of providing essential feedback that can address and close skills gaps. Human capital management consultancy CedarCrestone, for example, shows that automating performance management processes can reduce operational costs by 20 percent.

5. Skills and Observation Checklists

Automating the performance observation of healthcare employees as they work with real patients allows healthcare managers to take advantage of just-in-time training. If an employee fails to be “checked off” on a clinical or patient care competency, the system provides a clear understanding of where the knowledge gaps exist. In such cases, clinical educators can assign specific training to immediately address the skill deficiency.

6. Succession Management

Although an American Management Association study shows that 74 percent of healthcare organizations believe that succession is more important now than ever, almost one-third are doing no succession planning at all. Another 25 percent leave the task to the HR department – and with little backing from senior management.  Without this collaboration, effective succession is impossible. Automation can help everyone understand and visualize leadership and skills gaps and then take the necessary steps to address them. Most often, this will require internal development because of the difficulty and cost of filling these positions through recruitment.

Technology may not be the magic pill or cure all for what’s ailing healthcare employers, but it certainly can help those organizations meet the multi-layered challenges they face today.

To read more about talent management for healthcare organizations, download the white paper, “Talent Management for Healthcare: Facilitating Organizational Excellence and Outstanding Patient Care” here.