Go beyond 'thinking outside the box' to completely ignoring it

Hospitals and health systems have learned valuable lessons about hiring practices in the past year, and one of the learnings is that hiring practices need to be resilient regardless of what crisis occurs. Adam Gold, Chief Technology Officer at CHOC Children’s (Orange, CA) predicts the following: “The future will be more about a true delivery model for remote care that is agile enough to adapt to the next pandemic, social uprising or whatever else the future has in store for us. The new teams that will be formed will be focused not on thinking outside the box, but on ignoring the box altogether.”

Start by employing science in hiring practices

To develop a new kind of model for resilience, we’ll need to start infusing practices that combine evaluation of person-to-job fit with analysis of person-to-person behaviors by using science-based hiring platforms.

Understanding how teams function and how their members will work together can help leaders enhance productivity and make better management decisions. Leaders can visualize behavioral similarities, differences, and work styles using data that they have gathered in the past. This not only benefits leaders, but the people working within our healthcare systems, because it offers the potential to move to positions that may be better suited to them.

With full visibility into a team’s behavioral “DNA,” leaders can gain a deeper understanding of the group, how they function, and how interactions can be optimized to maximize productivity and deliver optimal patient care.

Drive better patient care using data

Healthcare inherently generates a lot of data from electronic health records, human resources, billing, and finance systems, and lab, radiology, and pharmacy departments, just to mention a few. The challenge is how to converge and analyze revenue cycle, ERP, and clinical system information. One prediction indicates that applying big data analytics system-wide could reduce US healthcare spending by $300-450 billion annually.

To assess who is working within your hospital, and the types of challenges they face, tapping into data from all of your human resources systems would offer better profiles of your people and their supervisors and work environment to help enable effective patient and caregiver experiences. This could be done by reviewing a spectrum of data that includes employee and patient satisfaction survey results, and clinical information.

More data will be used in coming years to sustain and improve the health of individuals and entire communities. COVID-19 has prompted even more standardization, collection, and collaboration of data that will help formulate a roadmap for better care in the future. As we’ve witnessed in the past year, drug development accelerated in efforts to not only treat the coronavirus but rapidly develop vaccines to mitigate its spread with two of the three vaccines currently approved in the US using mRNA technology that was built on decades of research and experience—and heavily relied on data and analytics.

Hail the rise of the gig worker

Gig workers, or temporary labor that involves individuals who rely on combining multiple part-time jobs to meet their financial needs, accelerated in recent months. A recent gig economy study indicates that healthcare was one of two industries that experienced the fastest growth over the last decade. Some estimates indicate that gig workers represented around 35% of the US workforce in 2020, which is up from between 14% and 20% in 2014.

The Gartner report, Workforce Planning for Competitive Advantage Post-COVID-19, revealed that when asked which factors contribute to a future-ready workforce, organizations most often ranked gig workers as the best way to add critical competencies, which can positively impact organizational resiliency.

To learn more about developing an organizational culture of flexibility in your organization that completely ignores the box, download our best practice guide, Reimagine organizational structure, culture, and the health of your people.

Matt Bragstad, Vice President, Infor People Vision & Strategy