Healthcare

The patient experience increasingly matters for healthcare organizations. Harvard Business Review says that upwards of 60% of healthcare spending can be directly influenced by active patient choices. This means optimizing the patient experience is critical for your organization’s success. But what exactly does that look like?

With our nation on the heels of an opioid epidemic, states continuing to legalize marijuana use, drug testing positivity rates continuing to rise, and the perception of a dwindling job applicant pool, some employers are challenging the entire idea of performing drug testing in their workplaces. Are there still benefits for conducting employee drug testing?

The 45th National Association for Health Care Recruitment (NAHCR) Conference took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania this past week. By practicing self-discovery, healthcare recruiters can become better leaders in the workplace. In the increasingly competitive healthcare hiring environment, recruiters are challenged with distinguishing their employer brand in order to tackle the industry’s biggest issues such as the ongoing talent shortages and passive talent pools. 

Anything that’s worth doing is worth improving, especially in healthcare. From managing new talent to screening employees to refining daily processes, these are all key components to saving time, resources, and most importantly, patients’ lives. 

In general, people who are passionate about continuous improvement often ask two important questions: “What are we doing?” and “How can we do it better?” By asking these kinds of questions, organizational leaders can begin to measure what is working and what needs improvement.

As the healthcare sector witnesses unprecedented organizational changes, fostering leadership potential in physicians is crucial. Studies have shown that physician leadership has positive effects on both organizational outcomes and patient care. There’s no question that physician leadership marks a change for the better in healthcare organizations, but achieving that change can be difficult.

So how can HR teams in healthcare organizations integrate physicians into leadership roles?

All business sectors have to adapt to survive in today’s consumer-driven culture, and that includes healthcare. Traditional physician-owned-and-operated practices are diminishing. Research by the American Medical Association notes that in 2018, there were fewer physician owners than physicians employed by larger healthcare networks.

For 15 years, the National Diversity Council (NDC) has been a resource and an advocate for the value of diversity and inclusion (D&I). NDC’s efforts include its annual diversity and leadership conference, but this year, the healthcare industry will also receive its very own diversity conference focusing on the issues unique to healthcare organizations.

New initiatives are a powerful driving force in healthcare, helping organizations reach efficiency benchmarks and harness new technologies to better serve patients. But they also can be overwhelming, giving employees a mountain of goals and responsibilities: Improve patient care. Digitize all patient and employee data. Improve provider retention. Shorten patient wait times.

Recruiting top talent in healthcare is no easy feat. With growing staffing shortages and a tight labor market, healthcare recruiters continue to face challenges unique only to the field. For example, according to research by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), only 39 percent of respondents said that they had adequate staffing with the right knowledge and skills at least 75 percent of the time.

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.