Camille Baxter:
Hello and welcome to Healthcare Insider, a sponsored content podcast series from Modern Healthcare Custom Media. I'm your host, Camille Baxter, and today we are thrilled to welcome to the podcast John Rothwell, Senior Vice President of Enterprise and Strategic Solutions at AMN Healthcare. John joined AMN Healthcare in 2022, and he has executive responsibility over sales, partnerships and enablement for AMN's workforce and technology enabled solutions. John came to AMN with an extensive background in healthcare cost management and performance improvement. Prior to AMN, he was the national vice president and commercial leader at Premier. In today's episode, John will share solutions and strategies for providers to build a resilient workforce amid persistent staffing challenges. John, thank you so much for being here today.
John Rothwell:
Thanks so much for having me, Camille. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.
Camille Baxter:
Well, me too, as this is such an important topic these days in healthcare, so let's jump right in. So how should hospital and health system leaders be managing their talent today, and how is that different from years past?
John Rothwell:
Well, talent management certainly has evolved dramatically over the past few years. We're still living in a current war for talent. Healthcare workers of all kinds are reassessing where, when, and how they work. At the same time, healthcare organizations need to build more resilient workforces, both full-time and contract, clinical and nonclinical can really withstand the changing nature and uncertainty in today's workplace. At the end of the day, we've got to be agile. Frankly, the healthcare workforce is grappling with unprecedented staffing shortages, fierce competition for that talent, high turnover rates and escalating costs. A healthy workforce is pivotal for delivering that high quality sustained care We know healthcare providers want and need. It encompasses well-prepared and confident professionals, appropriate staffing levels, flexibility and adequate training in order to really thrive.
In the past, healthcare organizations have managed talent in silos, both organizationally and from a technology perspective. This has really exacerbated the challenge for talent planning, talent acquisition, and talent deployment. A more effective approach involves adopting a holistic, multi-dimensional strategy focused on workforce management. Health systems need to be evaluating the required skills across their enterprise. They've got to be able to anticipate when, where, and how these skills will be needed, and then effectively manage scheduling to ensure that the people with the right skills are available in the right numbers at the right locations as needed. This is paramount to their long-term success, but this can really be accomplished by adopting an enterprise level strategy and focusing on a holistic talent ecosystem that increases flexibility by managing talent at scale across the entire organization, not just those silos that have persisted in the past.
By building reliable, sustainable staffing strategies, healthcare organizations can better fulfill their missions of delivering high quality patient care to the communities that they serve. In the next few years, hybrid talent acquisition approaches combining core staff with flexible contract staffing will become the expectation. Additionally, technology enabled services and workforce analytics will continue to gain prominence, enhancing efficiency, speed, and just as important sustainability. These developments are poised to alleviate current staffing challenges and really bolster the organization's future readiness to be able to tackle these issues as they continue to come up.
Camille Baxter:
John, based on the fact that so much is changing in healthcare and staffing is so important, what would you identify as the key tenets of a successful effective workforce management strategy? What components should be involved?
John Rothwell:
It's really the crux of one our industry is facing every day. There isn't a one size fits all solution to effective workforce management, nor is it just a singular strategy. Finding the right partners is key. Ideal workforce management technology and staffing partners must understand an organization's position, their challenges, their capabilities, and their talent management maturity. These partners have to extend the organization's talent acquisition function by offering expertise, additional capacity, diverse staffing models, and access to a broad talent pool, not just limited to those contract workers.
As an example, AMN Healthcare is a comprehensive total talent solutions provider offering everything from traditional nurse staffing and permanent staffing outsourcing to specialty physician recruitment and language interpretation services along with holistic workforce optimization analytics to serve as the backbone to enable data-driven decision making. This spectrum of talent solutions and powers health systems with an integrated approach that really bridges the total talent planning, acquisition, and deployment process into a singular workforce technology ecosystem that acts as an extension of healthcare providers to operationalize these strategies. Strategies like creating internal agency or float pools. This really takes a know-how and a customized strategy and technology enablement to bring all of these strategies to fruition.
Camille Baxter:
I'd like to dive into that a little bit further. What is an internal agency and why should healthcare organizations consider implementing one?
John Rothwell:
That's a great question. In its purest form, an internal agency is a strategy where a healthcare provider controls their contract labor at certain scale, like an internal float pool. It's not necessarily a holistic strategy. Again, it's really at scale. Today's post pandemic period has left healthcare organizations grappling with a myriad of staffing challenges. There's been a definitive shift in the landscape, and many clinicians are seeking greater flexibility within their careers. Clinical burnout and a growing preference for flexibility of undoubtedly contributed to organization's high turnover rates, limited access to skilled professionals and job vacancies.
To overcome these issues and control costs, some health systems have adopted innovative solutions and strategies such as creating their own self-managed internal agencies and float pools. These strategies give healthcare organizations direct control over their staffing operations and their costs by designing, building and managing their flexible labor pools. But at the same time, they offer that flexibility that we know these clinicians are continuing to want and need, and it's also providing internal mobility that these clinicians are seeking.
With the increasing demand for greater flexibility... This gets back to what we were talking about earlier around the agility and that agile approach, adopting internal agency solutions has become a critical workforce strategy, again, at scale. But in order to optimize healthcare resource allocation, internal float pools provide healthcare systems with a means of effectively managing staffing operations and expenses by establishing their own versatile labor pools and effectively overseeing those.
Camille Baxter:
So how can a partner help hospitals and health systems with their workforce?
John Rothwell:
Organizations must approach the strategy, the build out, and the execution of a new flexible workforce by investing in expertise to create the right models for their organization, but as importantly for their culture. And this is done by integrating the appropriate technology infrastructure into their ecosystem, providing self-service capabilities for the workforce to manage their own availability, their own schedule, giving them more control. But I would say the biggest evolution is the focus on technology. Healthcare providers need innovation to address key workforce challenges, particularly in labor forecasting, recruitment, retention, and enterprise level business intelligence that provides those executives with the data to drive those key talent decisions.
Technology innovation really revolves around three primary aspects of workforce management. The first is talent planning. Robust analytics that use patient demand data are able to precisely forecast staffing needs, days, weeks, even months in advance. This includes core staffing, internal agency pools, external flexible staffing, and really the forecasting and optimization technology platforms that are enabling this data-driven staffing decisions are now essential. They're really a crucial part of being able to proactively schedule your resources, delivering better labor cost management, and improving the employee alignment and the satisfaction that goes along with it.
The second piece of this technology evolution is really around talent acquisition. This is technology that leverages AI or artificial intelligence that can now rapidly identify and match qualified candidates for specific jobs. Based on that roles requirement and the candidate's skill level expertise and certain credentials that they hold, this significantly accelerates the hiring process effectively engages qualified candidates and allows the health system to tap into gig workers or day worker candidate pools. Candidate engagement platforms like the AMN Healthcare Passport application also expedite credentialing and virtual onboarding, enabling seamless integration for health systems. Through these virtual credential wallets, clinicians and other healthcare workers can easily upload their credentials that are automatically integrated into a healthcare systems platform. What this does is really speeds up the time for new employees to hit the ground running and removes a pretty common pain point for healthcare systems today.
And then the third tenet of technology innovation is really around talent development. Technology is optimizing workforce deployment in areas such as staffing agency vendor management, telehealth, even language interpretation services, internal agencies, and float pool management. These deployment technology tools help automatically align staffing skills and levels with the requirements to allow workers and health systems to have more flexibility in how they deploy talent to ensure quality patient care.
Last but certainly not least, integration is vital for these technology solutions and for the broader talent management strategies, not just in the workforce domain, but across HR, timekeeping and financial systems to ensure that workforce processes and data governance are reliable and valid. We're continuing to live in a world of data-driven decision-making, and we've got to be able to have clean integrated data to paint a holistic picture for healthcare providers to really hone in and effectively manage these talent strategies.
Camille Baxter:
John, this has been so informative. Is there anything else you'd like to add for our listeners?
John Rothwell:
Well, Camille, thank you again for having me today. I really do appreciate this conversation. If I could leave you with three things, it would be a reiteration of the agile approach that we have to take to workforce strategy. There is no one size fits all strategy that is going to solve all of our problems. Rather, a series of strategies at scale to be able to leverage as a part of a broader workforce strategy. We've got to look at all of these individual levers as individual strategies to create sustained improvement that ultimately is going to result in margin improvement for healthcare systems. And the last is that these partnerships are becoming more important than ever. The ability to drive and define a partner that can act as an extension of your organization will be paramount as we continue to work towards and solve these talent management strategies that face our healthcare systems.
Camille Baxter:
Again, John, thank you so much for being here today.
John Rothwell:
Thank you again.
Camille Baxter:
This has been a sponsored episode of Healthcare Insider, created in collaboration with AMN Healthcare. If you'd like to connect with them, please email [email protected]. I'm your host, Camille Baxter. Look for more episodes of Healthcare Insider under the multimedia tab at modernhealthcare.com or subscribe to your preferred pod catcher. Thanks for listening.
