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Healthcare Operations Summit 2024
Workforce Strategies to Move Forward in a Challenging Environment
Author
Niel Oscarson
Author
Shawn Howell
Author
Dallin Seely
In September 2024, KLAS hosted the Healthcare Operations Summit in Park City, Utah. During the event, representatives from 17 provider organizations, 15 HIT vendors, 1 investment firm, and 3 sponsors discussed one of the most pervasive challenges affecting the operations of provider organizations: staffing shortages. Summit panels and discussions centered on three key pillars of workforce management: the recruitment, retention, and optimization of healthcare employees. This report summarizes the insights on healthcare operations from a presummit attendee survey and the summit discussions, ultimately highlighting participants’ strategic priorities, challenges, and ideas for potential solutions.
Presummit Survey Insights
Before the summit, 45 healthcare-executive attendees responded to the following questions about the three pillars of recruitment, retention, and optimization of their healthcare employees. Their answers helped shape the small-group discussions that occurred at the summit.
What is the key pillar(s) to your overall strategy in dealing with nursing and staffing shortages?
What are your top challenges when recruiting, retaining, and optimizing resources?
Recruitment: Finding resources with the right knowledge and skills, inability to meet demands of potential resources (pay, bonuses, schedule, etc.)
Retention: Inability to meet demands of hired resources (pay, bonuses, schedule, etc.) while in competition with other organizations
Optimization: Insufficient time, resources, and processes (e.g., poor staffing ratios, poor resource management/assignment, increased programmatic needs)
How important is technology in achieving your goals for nursing and staff recruitment, retention, and optimization?
The highest percentage of respondents identified technology as extremely or very important when optimizing their healthcare resources. This signifies that better technology can most improve workflows and create efficiencies for staff, who often have to do more with less.
What do you view as the most important existing and future technology for impacting nurse/staff recruitment, retention, and optimization?
Existing technology: An optimized, efficient EHR was named the most impactful technology when addressing the above challenges regarding recruitment, retention, and optimization of resources. Respondents also mention the benefits of virtual nursing and mobile self-scheduling tools on recruitment and retention, as well as improved nurse scheduling tools for optimization.
Future technology: In looking at what future technologies might help organizational operations, respondents mention AI in documentation across all three areas of workforce management, as well as AI in scheduling and workflows specifically for retention. Virtual nursing is also mentioned as an important future technology across all three areas of workforce management, highlighting the varying adoption of this technology in healthcare today.
Summit Insights
Keynote Panel on Workforce Strategies
At the summit, Niel Oscarson (Research Director of Healthcare Operations at KLAS) led a panel on workforce strategies with three healthcare leaders and providers: Todd Craig from Mercy, Bruce Rogen from Cleveland Clinic, and Linda Stevenson from Fisher-Titus Medical Center. The panel focused on the importance of having great technology partners to help operations in this challenging environment. Vendors can be a strong partner by (1) ensuring that the speed of software keeps pace with daily workflows, (2) finding ways to gamify solutions to make the use more engaging for end users, (3) taking on risk alongside organizations to help profit margins and work together to solve problems, and (4) understanding organizational problems and priorities to ensure smooth implementations. Vendor partners need to be proactive and strategic in how they work with provider organizations to help them achieve actual outcomes. The panel also discussed the importance of EHR training, robust scheduling solutions, and the promise of predictive technology that may bring intelligence to staffing and scheduling models.
Small-Group Discussions
Following the panel discussion, summit attendees participated in small-group discussions focused on a specific pillar to build on the insights found in the presummit survey and panel discussion. Participants brought up multiple pain points related to each pillar and then collaborated on potential solutions for addressing these challenges, seen in the tables below.
Healthcare Operations Pain Points & Solutions
Recruitment
Pain points
- Small pool of potential employees
- Lack of strong work-life balance
- Need for flexibility for female staff (nurses specifically)
- Need for better employee benefits (e.g., education, mentors, career ladders)
- Need for scheduling solutions capable of handling complex math and staffing scenarios
- Need for a strong company culture that candidates will want to work in
Solutions
- Focus on benefits and employee pipeline (reputation of organization, tuition, mentors, career paths, etc.)
- Provide internships for colleges and high schools to improve the pipeline in recruiting efforts
- Focus on providing a strong work-life balance
- Have scheduling solutions that can handle complex staffing scenarios
- Have a role-specific recruiter for each department to more effectively find the right people and manage expectations of new hires
Retention
Pain points
- Need for more streamlined onboarding
- Lack of control/flexibility in schedule
- Lack of career paths
- Clinicians not operating at the top of their licenses, often resulting in them doing more administrative tasks than necessary
- Lack of recognition from organization
Solutions
- Organizations need to focus on three things: trust, technology, and capacity/capability
- Build trust in meetings, take feedback, provide career growth opportunities, and ensure the well-being of employees
- Use technology to reduce administrative burden for clinicians so they can spend more time with patients and have learning/growth opportunities
- Provide more focus on work-life balance for clinicians
Optimization
Pain points
- Burden of documentation, requiring too much time on a computer rather than with the patient
- Manual, mundane tasks that are not yet automated, often leading to double work
- Clinicians not operating at the top of their licenses
- Need for better employee benefits (e.g., education, mentors, career ladders)
- Technology requires too much training and should be more intuitive
- Prioritization of problem resolution
Solutions
- Identify repetitive, mundane work and reduce that work; ensure people work at the top of their licensure, and optimize automation opportunities
- Use advanced analytics to better predict and prepare for workload and scheduling conflicts
Summit Attendees
Sponsors
David Oberdorf, SVP, Capital One
Clare Barnes, Director, TripleTree
Mark Wise, Director, TripleTree
Provider Organizations
Todd Craig, VP of Clinical Informatics, Mercy
Jeff Del Vecchio, MHA, Mercy
Ron Double, CIO, Parkview Health
Vel Fenker, VP of RCM, Team Rehabilitation Physical Therapy
Melissa Friend, Senior Director of IT, Fisher-Titus Medical Center
Josh Glandorf, CIO, UC San Diego Health
John Joe, Director, St. Luke’s/Vigor Health
Porter Jones, VP of Clinical Transformation, Avant-garde Health
Bill McGrath, CTO, Next Level Medical
Khurram Mir, Director of Innovation and Health Ventures, UCI Health
Melissa Mitchell, CEO, HealthLinc
Janelle Nelson, CEO, Mountain Independent Hospital Alliance
Bruce Rogen, CMIO, Cleveland Clinic
David Sanner, CMIO, Loma Linda University Medical Center
Ranjana Singhal, Director of Enterprise Applications, San Francisco Department of Public Health
Derek Stephens, Office of the CIO, LHC Group
Linda Stevenson, CIO, Fisher-Titus Medical Center
VendorsÂ
Greg Benoit, CEO, QGenda
Ryan Brazell, Chief Revenue Officer, TeamBuilder
Steve Fanning, SVP of Industry Strategy, Infor
Bill Fera, Principal Product Strategist, Deloitte
Brian Fugere, Chief Product Officer, symplr
Liz Griffith, Director of EHR Education, uPerform
David Howard, CEO, TeamBuilder
Michael Johnson, President and CEO, Multiview
Lindsey Klein, Chief Strategy Officer, QGenda
John Kravits, VP of Healthcare, Workday
Kristin Russel, Chief Marketing Officer, symplr
Peter Schmidt, Principal Product Strategist, Workday
Kristin Shelley, Director of Industry & Solution Strategy, Infor
Sarah Szpaichler, Managing Director, Deloitte
Leora Westbrook, President, AMN Healthcare
Investment Firm
Harris Hyman, Senior Executive Partner, Thomas H Lee Partners
Writer
Carlisa Cramer
Designer
Nikki Christensen
Project Manager
Amanda Wind
This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2024 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.