Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has the potential to revolutionize healthcare delivery. Within the past decade, healthcare HR teams demonstrated a strong correlation between employee engagement and better patient outcomes and experiences. Today, the evidence is insurmountable. 

Many supporters of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare promote its potential for improving diagnostics, predicting treatment effectiveness and patient outcomes, and providing new insights into EHR data and population health. While AI does have potential for clinical application, it may also have a future in healthcare human resource (HR) departments.

Hospitals and other healthcare organizations are increasingly focused on improving the quality of patient care. This is driven partly by the move to value-based reimbursement models, competition among healthcare companies, and the more recent COVID-19 public health emergency, which put a spotlight on healthcare’s strengths and weaknesses.

With more attention than ever placed on the quality of care, what can healthcare organizations do to improve? Here are a few ideas you should consider.

Recruiting and retaining top candidates has long been a challenge for the healthcare industry. Besides the risk of working around patients with infectious disease, as seen in the COVID-19 outbreak, healthcare organizations and their workers face a number of other difficulties:

Disruption is the new normal. We face disruption from economic changes, new working styles, technology — every aspect of work has either been a disruptor or been disrupted, and talent management is no exception. 

There are few industries more important to our daily lives than healthcare. Its importance is reflected in its sustained growth — even during the Great Recession, the healthcare industry continued to expand. As life expectancies increase and technology improves, there will be even more growth in an industry that shows no sign of slowing down.

Healthcare is rapidly changing. Amid the industry’s ongoing turbulence, physician and staff engagement are suffering. Burnout and turnover rates can be especially high, and can have particularly high costs, with dissatisfaction contributing to poor performance and preventable medical errors.

Healthcare organizations have one mission—to provide quality care to patients. And nurses are integral to accomplishing that mission.

As we kick off the New Year, here’s a look back at the most popular posts from the previous year. 2018 was a year with a heightened focus on compliance for employers as FCRA litigation ensues while the healthcare industry faces the ongoing challenges of a rapidly changing sector. Background check compliance, drug testing, workplace appreciation, and the Death Master File Search are all topics that were most popular among our readers in the past year.

Healthcare organizations have long been under distinct industry-specific pressures, and human resources professionals in healthcare need innovative approaches to manage those challenges effectively. As healthcare companies cope with an aging customer base, expanding coverage and an avalanche of new technology opportunities and concerns, HR departments will be forced to play an even larger role helping companies and workers adapt to these evolving conditions.