In 2012, as South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, New York, was providing care for residents severely impacted by Hurricane Sandy, another storm was brewing—but this one was on the books. The Affordable Care Act was rolling out, value-based care was taking root, and rising costs were becoming a major challenge for the 455-bed hospital, a key provider of medical services for the nearby barrier island beach communities. The first step? Rein in a big chunk of spending by overhauling inventory management, determined Mark Bogen, CFO and senior vice president of finance.
Powering Up: How HR's Superheroes Are Attracting a New Workforce
September 11, 2015
As healthcare organizations ramp up the battle for specialized workers, human resources leaders are developing a new rulebook for hiring and engaging top-of-the-line talent. Advances in big data, EMR technology, and nursing practices are enabling healthcare organizations to take important steps forward with clinical and business goals, but for talent management leaders, finding qualified candidates has gotten that much harder. In addition to dealing with perpetual shortages in key areas like nursing, organizations are hustling to find and develop the next generation of employees who can perform not only increasingly complex roles but also jobs that are facility-specific. Sponsored material.
As healthcare organizations become more adept at collaboration, data mining, and understanding the unique populations they serve, they are designing innovative care programs that involve higher risks and rewards.
From Ebola preparedness to leading large-scale changes, today's master's degree programs are producing leaders eager to tackle this generation's most pressing challenges.
Rahul Anand, MD, is chief epidemiologist at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, where he heads up all infectious disease prevention activities for the nonprofit integrated delivery network, from Ebola preparedness to hand washing. He's also adjunct assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Utah, where he worked full time prior to moving to the East Coast. On top of that, he is one-third of the way through an MBA program at the University of Massachusetts Isenberg School of Management. It will take him another two years to finish the online program.
Hospitals seek clinical partners who will integrate into the fabric of their organizations as they make key transformations in anesthesia, hospital medicine, and the ED.
Two years ago Saint Agnes Hospital set a new course for its emergency department: It was time to take patient satisfaction scores to the next level, as well as make critical changes to improve patient throughput. Admission and discharge times were too high, and too many patients were leaving without being seen. While the hospital had outsourced its ED for two decades with varying degrees of success, a strategic plan called for bringing on a brand-new national clinical partner to help revamp the department. "Our ED accounts for about 70% of our admissions," says Adrian Long, MD, CMO for the 276-bed teaching hospital in Baltimore. "The ED was the front door to the hospital, and it was important for us that we had providers who were going to improve these scores and our performance."
From the cloud and mobile devices to the latest in robotics, healthcare’s renegades are riding a new wave of transformational technologies.
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, which sits on a steep hill in one of the city’s foggiest neighborhoods, may be only 30 miles north of Silicon Valley, but for its researchers and clinicians, technology disruption starts on the home turf. Unwilling to wait for others to develop the same slick apps and technologies that consumers have come to expect, UCSF is finding success forging its own innovative path. “When you are on your computer doing your work and you get a FaceTime message on your iPhone from your kid who’s 3,000 miles away, you ask, ‘Why can’t we do this in healthcare?’ ” says Robert Wachter, MD, chief of the division of hospital medicine and chief of medical service. “Here, when we see gaps like that, we have the inclination to develop a tool to fix it.”