Ohio pharmacists say that if insurers payed them to have one-on-one time with patients with chronic diseases and on multiple medications, it would improve health and save money. Supporters point to a 10-year effort in Asheville, NC, that includes pharmacist care for patients with chronic problems as they make the pitch to health insurers and others. The goal is to persuade the insurers to pay pharmacists for the care and coordination they'll offer to these chronic care patients, who may be seeing multiple doctors and going to multiple drugstores for their medications.
Mayfield Heights, OH-based Hillcrest Hospital, a Cleveland Clinic facility, has received an anonymous $5 million donation toward a major expansion project. The $163 million expansion is expected to be finished by mid-2010 and includes adding a Level III neonatal intensive care unit with all private rooms, doubling the emergency department space, and expanding and redesigning operating rooms.
Rebecca Carl, chief marketing and community relations officer for Clarian Health in Indianapolis talks about her health system's recent campaign, "A Call for Change." The campaign encouraged patients to educate themselves and make lifestyle changes that will allow them to live longer, healthier lives. Carl will speak during the June 17 HealthLeaders Media Webcast, Marketing Oncology: Strategies for service line campaigns.
Healthcare leaders spend a lot of time predicting and planning for the future, but when it comes to hiring and retaining employees, I hear a lot more about future problems than I hear possible solutions. One healthcare futurist told me that hospitals must make themselves places that people are "dying to work at," but nobody is very good at defining what those hospitals will look like.
Regardless of what the future holds for healthcare and hospitals, most experts agree that recruiting and retaining enough employees will take a lot of change—something that healthcare isn’t always good at. So smart leaders are already changing the way they look at staffing.
An HR leader of a multi-hospital system recently told me that her organization makes a point to talk about people—not just systems and process—in every senior management meeting. And I’ve noticed lately that other healthcare leaders have changed the way they talk about their work force and how they hire. Here’s some of what I’m hearing:
"We don’t own them." Gone are the days when organizations could cage their nurses in one department because they feared another organization would "steal" their nurses. Today, smart organizations have learned that they don’t own their nurses; so, if they don’t offer experience and learning opportunities, other organizations will.
Some hospitals are offering their nurses travel and job-sharing opportunities. Cold-weather hospitals, for example, might allow nurses to travel to Florida for the winter months, then return to their jobs in the spring.
Or, if a good employee at a community hospital does leave to try a job at a larger tertiary system, the community hospital leaves the door open for that employee to one day return. Smart organizations already know that giving their employees exposure to the outside world will keep them on the inside in the future.
"They don’t always have to be nurses." How many nurses does it take to run a hospital? It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but some organizations have discovered that they don’t need as many nurses as they once thought. Forward-thinking hospitals are using nursing assistants, other staff, even family to take on roles that don’t require a nursing degree.
"Newspaper want ads don’t work." Your next good employee isn’t sitting home with a newspaper and a highlighter. Today’s candidates are online, in social networks like Facebook, and writing blogs, so that’s where your want ads should be. Some leaders tell me they spend their print-advertising budget on relocation services because it’s a much more effective recruitment tool than an ad in the local newspaper.
"Neither do sign-on bonuses." As one healthcare leader told me, sign-on bonuses are "an addiction that is hard to break." Whenever hiring gets tough, someone will say, "What about sign-on bonuses?" But, sign-on bonuses, in the long run, only temporarily fill a hole while ticking off other employees. If you want to attract good employees, pitch your organization’s learning opportunities. Signing bonuses only attract people who are looking for sign-on bonuses. Once the bonus is spent, they’ll be off to find another one.
"Turnover is good." Inconceivable! This is the one that surprises me most, even though it makes perfect sense. Increasingly, CEOs tell me they don’t want everybody—even when faced with shortages—so they’re committed to hiring only good employees and weeding out bad ones. They’ll even hire the right person who has no experience before they’ll hire the wrong person who has an impressive resume.
"Who cares about the hospital next door?" It’s no longer enough just to emulate the hospital next door when it comes to finding and keeping good employees. Recruitment and retention—if you want them to be effective—must be based on the best practices out there, regardless of whether or not they’re found in healthcare. That’s why many of the work force changes I’m hearing about come from outside of healthcare.
What about you? How have your staffing philosophies changed? What are you doing to make your organization a place people are dying to work at—both today and in the future? I’d love to hear about it.
Molly Rowe is leadership editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at mrowe@healthleadersmedia.com.
CFO Kimberly Boynton and CEO Paul Kronenberg of Crouse Health Hospital in Syracuse, NY, described their hospital's performance dashboard and how it impacts quality, builds employee trust, and fosters healthy competition.
The Catholic Health System and the Community Health Center of Buffalo have agreed to create a patient-care center in the city. The 40,000 square-foot site will offer a comprehensive set of services from primary care to specialty care and laboratories. It will be owned and operated by the Community Health Center while Sisters of Charity Hospital will lease space for imaging and accept referrals for prenatal and obstetrics care.
Independence Blue Cross and Radnor, PA-based Jefferson Health System have reached an agreement on new three-year contracts. The new agreement, effective June 1, 2008, covers Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, including its Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience division and Methodist Hospital division; the Main Line Health hospitals; and the three Frankford Hospital campuses.
Tampa, FL-based African Ambassadors began serving the community in 2003 with only two doctors, a nurse and slim funding. It has since helped nearly 2,000 patients who can't afford adequate healthcare, organizers say. African Ambassadors is a nonprofit organization that gives secondary medical support to Tampa residents. The organization also provides free healthcare to those who have insufficient health insurance or none at all. Patients pay what they can afford, which oftentimes is nothing.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota is dropping a service that provided consumers with telephone advice about ongoing health conditions, but will launch its own, more elaborate program in 2009. Healthways, a Tennessee-based medical outsourcing company, had been providing the service to Blue Cross under a 2001 contract. Blue Cross plans to now build its own internal organization to handle the telephone disease management services as well as new phone services aimed at people who are medically at risk.
An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year, which some doctors say is because the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. And because doctors have easy access to prescription drugs and a precise knowledge of both how the body works and the amount of a drug needed for an overdose to stop breathing and halt the heart, it can be a dangerous combination. The American Medical Association has even called physician suicide "an endemic catastrophe."
