Ready or Not, Healthcare HR is Going Strategic

It's one of the great ironies of healthcare human resources.

There is arguably no other labor-intensive industry that is so reliant upon a highly skilled, highly educated, high-cost, and high-in-demand workforce that literally makes life-or-death decisions every day. And yet, in many hospitals and health systems HR remains an afterthought in the C-suite. HR is considered the domain of pencil-pushing functionaries whose job descriptions do not include strategic planning, and who are better suited for tactical tasks and processes.

There is a growing sense, however, that changes in healthcare brought on by the commercial market and by the federal healthcare law, the inevitable and growing shortages of skilled healthcare professionals, and the newfound and measurable importance of patient satisfaction scores for reimbursements will prompt a reassessment of HR in strategic planning. 

Stephanie Drake, executive director of the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration (ASHHRA), concedes that healthcare HR has traditionally been "reactive and not necessarily proactive" around long-term planning and other strategic aims.

"It's all over the board. Some of our ASHHRA members are quite engaged at the board level, looking at turnover and performance issues as they relate to patient safety and experience. But we have other members who might be at the board table but they aren't sure what they should be contributing," she says.

"HR needs to understand what the CEO needs, where the organization is headed to better prepare itself," Drake says. "I know we talk about workforce shortages, but many of our hospitals haven't seen it yet and if they aren't paying attention. Five years down the road they are going to hit a wall where they don't have enough nurses or physicians. People will be retiring at an astronomical rate and maybe HR hasn't done enough to prepare or even to understand that this is coming down the pike."

Perhaps the biggest single impetus for expanding the strategic role of healthcare HR will come from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), which attaches cold, hard cash to the once-fuzzy term "patient satisfaction."

"HCAHPS will go a long way in changing attitudes," says Michael DiPietro, with HealthcareSource, which has created a brief survey for ASHHRA that address the strategic role of healthcare HR. "Now there is transparency. Now there is so much more focus on patient satisfaction and quality outcomes. Patient satisfaction is directly impacted by the competencies and behaviors of employees. That is a key driver. As CEOs get more pressure to improve HCAHPS scores, there are certain things you can do on the clinical side, but they are going to turn to the VP of HR and say 'you need to help solve this.'"

The ASHHRA survey asks healthcare HR executives what they're doing in three strategic areas -- patient safety, patient satisfaction, cost containment -- and what technologies they're using to support initiatives in these areas.

"We are always trying to figure out what is the connection between talent management or the role of HR as it links to quality and patient safety, and where we fall in," Drake says. "We have a variety of groups working in hospitals and in the pursuit of excellent and quality and patient safety roles, but we struggle as a professional society to figure out where we fit in. This study will help us find more linkages."

 If you've got a few minutes, take the survey. It provides an opportunity to assess where you are as an HR executive, and what your strategic role will be for your healthcare organization. You'd better prepare, because HR is going strategic, with or without you.