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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Healthcare Upside / Down: The Connection Between Clinical Education & Workforce Strategy
00:20:23
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Healthcare Upside Down, a podcast by Becker's Healthcare and ECG Management Consultants, where we'll explore the upsides and downsides of healthcare and the industry's most current trends. I'm Erica Spicer Mason, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by two guests who will walk us through the connection between clinical education and workforce strategy. I'd like to welcome Katrina Anderson, the Senior Vice President of Strategic growth at Clinician Nexus, and Jessica Wells, Principal at ECG Management Consultants. Katrina. Jessica, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.
- [00:35]
B
Thank you for having us.
- [00:37]
A
Well, it's great to have you both on the line today. So thank you again for making time for this. And I wanted to see if we could just kick off the episode today by learning a little bit more about you both. So if you wouldn't mind, Katrina, maybe you can kick us off. If you could just share a little bit more about yourself and your work in healthcare, that would be great.
- [00:56]
C
Yes, definitely. I started my journey in the clinical education community about 13 years ago. I worked in a regional health system in Minnesota in the Office of Health Professional Education, which was a department responsible for the education of the residents, fellows, medical students, nursing allied health students, et cetera. It was during that time that I was exposed to perhaps what I would say is an opportunity to improve how we leverage technology to tell the story of our education activities. I had the idea for a platform. I said, what if we were able to support those learners sort of from application through offboarding, and be able to really tell our story at scale. And the long and short is it's about to be the 10 year anniversary of starting Clinician Nexus, which is has been a platform that really helps tell that story across those different learner types. I had the opportunity to meet actually Jessica in 2017, whereby we were able to validate not only this on a state level, but at a national level together. And so mostly I want to always say my immense gratitude to Jessica because of her leadership in this community. My life's been changed and also the thousands of students lives have been changed through this. So it's been a grand adventure.
- [02:20]
A
Well, Katrina, it's been great learning about this adventure of yours. And congratulations on the 10th anniversary for clinician Nexus. That's so exciting.
- [02:28]
B
Thank you.
- [02:29]
A
Yeah. And Jessica would love to learn a little bit more about you and your work at ecg.
- [02:33]
B
Yeah, thank you. I've had the pleasure of working exclusively in academic healthcare for the last 25 years. And so predominantly I've been on the operational side at health system roles. So hospitals, nonprofit regional health systems, and then where I met Katrina at a national for profit health system that worked nationally across the US and then of course, I had the opportunity to work on the academic side through joint appointments, through medical schools and graduate medical education and interprofessional education kind of roles. And now I get the opportunity to work in an advisory capacity with a variety of hospitals, health systems and academic institutions. But what these experiences have allowed me to do is to help organizations, both academics and hospitals or health systems, kind of bridge that. How do academic partners and their health systems or hospitals kind of work collectively to help with these clinical placements or find the right kind of sweet spot, which is also the opportunity to continue working with Katrina and kind of where this kind of sweet spot kind of comes into play.
- [03:43]
A
Well, it's great to learn. You learn about you as well, Jessica, and your rich history in kind of the healthcare academia space. And I think actually you might be. I think it'd be perfect to hear from you on this first question because I did want to take a bit of a broad look at what's going on at hospitals and health systems. Over the past few years, especially these organizations have faced major workforce strain marked by staffing shortages, burnout, growing competition for talent. So I'd love to know from your point of view, how has that environment changed the way leaders should think about clinical student placement as part of their broader workforce strategies?
- [04:21]
B
Yeah, that's a really great question, especially since I think that we can all agree that it's not new for health systems to continually talk about the way that shortages are not new. It didn't necessarily start with COVID but it certainly has been accentuated over the years since COVID has occurred. And so leaders are starting to recognize that simply accommodating learners is not necessarily the goal. And they're shifting away from it being, hey, I have these learners and I'm trying to find placements for them or, or their partners, their academic partners are saying, can you take more and more learners? They're starting to see that having clinical learning opportunities is really a workforce strategy. And what that really means is building best in class teaching environments. They're trying to align up and wanting to have the opportunity to have clinical placements that are intentionally aligned with their service line growths. What are their high needs specialties? What is that long term future pipeline growth that they're needing to do? Where are their geographic access issues and how to prioritize creating pipeline access points associated with that and trying to get away from that external recruitment, how do they start to recruit more intentionally internally? What does that really mean? And more importantly, how do they understand their internal environment? What's the right learning mix? Do they have the right clinical volumes associated with it? Who in their environment is teaching? What does it mean to be a teacher in their environment? What's their conversion data associated with that? How do they anticipate workforce shortages and inform their investment decisions? And then what's the quality and consistency of that learning and working environment that equates to that future hiring success? The engagement of their current employees? And then how do they build that reputation of being that employer of choice of their future workforce? And those really, when it, when it's kind of all can come together, becomes a strategic asset. And that's what they want to be able to be seen in their marketplace. That's where that competition in their market changes from being I'm accommodating learners to being a strategic asset.
- [06:35]
A
I really appreciate the way you framed that, Jessica, and especially those kind of essential questions that you posed. I think those will be helpful starting points for our listeners as they're considering this. And just to take this a little bit further, when clinical education is treated strategically, as you mentioned, what does a strong student and preceptor experience really look like here? And how does that experience strengthen the longer term clinician pipeline and even the employer's brand?
- [07:03]
B
Yeah, those are really hard questions. And I'll tell you, it's really hard for leaders because when it gets down to the really crux of it, it's about the intentionality of being integrated into the culture and designed into the delivery of care. And so we have to look through the lens of intentionally supporting our preceptors, our learners and our patients. And so I'll start with the preceptor side. So we know that from research that when our preceptors are supported to teach that they experience lower burnout and greater professional fulfillment. And that translates into higher engagement and retention in the organization. So when teaching is valued and as part of their job and not an added duty, then they themselves create an environment that learners lean into also. So it creates this kind of mutual satisfaction within that environment. At the same time, learners feel part of the care team, that they're contributing to the clinical environment rather than feeling like they're a burden. And that's that high quality learning environment, but it's also a high quality working environment and that drives commitment to the organization. And so that's that increased Likelihood that learners return as employee. And that reinforces the system's reputation as a place that invests in its people and that's invest in our current staff, it's invest in those in the future. And that's really that brand recognition and that's that, that conversion impact. But that's intentionally designed and intentionally created in that culture. But that culture is that representation of our lived experience. And that's when people walk out the door every day and say my I matter. Like what I'm doing matters. I'm growing, I'm capable. Our patients feel it on the day to day. And that brand reputation is better than any billboard. It's better than anything that we can do on a marketing and scale. It's that lived experience that people will take away. That's that reputation that you want to be known in that market.
- [09:05]
A
Yeah, thanks Jessica. I appreciate this clear picture of what that high quality learning environment looks like and how that kind of creates this domino effect on learners and also even the organization and its greater workforce. So I want to move into talking a little bit more about what it takes to create that environment. And Katrina, I know you mentioned in your previous role before founding Clinician Nexus that you had this vantage point of kind of seeing some challenges that health systems and hospitals face whenever they're managing clinical learners. So right now where are you seeing health systems struggle most in managing clinical learners at scale? And how should leaders begin to think about the role of tech in addressing those challenges?
- [09:51]
C
Yeah, great question. I would say we'll often see health systems use kind of or deploy three different assumptions that result in what I would say is a struggle to scale. The first is taking a point of view that this is a university only issue, that it's purely up to universities to create and make and bring clinicians into the workforce. I think Jessica said it well that this is an education in practice and it really requires that co development between the university and the health system. I think the second assumption we'll often see is that students of all kind are a little too different to be managed in one place. For example, you have a cohort of eight nursing students who rotate within different units of a hospital. That feels so different than a fourth year medical student who might engage only in a sort of one to one preceptor type relationship. And so I think there's often an assumption that they're all very different and they couldn't possibly be in one place. And the third is, I think assuming that software is a strategy to solving this problem and when we see those three assumptions sort of exist within a system that often results in a couple of things. One, the student has way too many students, or the health system is paying for a lot of duplicative efforts on both their students and their. Their administrative staff trying to understand who's moving about where. It also results in too many vendors. We have too many vendors for just nursing versus, again, medicine or maybe the. The physical therapy department. When you start to have so many different vendors, that leads to a ton of administrative complexity, different data sets. And then eventually when it rolls up to that executive team and they are responsible for both telling the narrative of the community benefit they're providing, monitoring the quality of that incoming pipeline, it also makes it really difficult to figure out how to act and maneuver and behave a little bit different, differently within that. And so I think maybe in sort of pulling those three assumptions together, what often will happen is the vendor community will be kind of leveraged more as a transactional requirement as well as opposed to a partner to really build and solve this problem. And that's something that, again, I think was a big win with Jessica and has been with other systems that we've worked with, is when the technology experts are the experts that can kind of solve for some of this complexity at scale. We take that on while the health system and the university can take on really what matters, which is, to Jessica's point, the quality of that experience, the quality of the learning that goes on, and therefore, as well, how that impacts patients. And so I think it's, you know, a lot of the assumptions are probably a really good place to start when thinking about how you, how you would pivot your strategy in this space.
- [12:57]
B
Yeah.
- [12:57]
A
Thanks, Katrina. And when you've seen hospitals and health systems adopt or embrace this approach, I'm curious to know the organizational elements that have been in place before that tech has gone live that can really support this shift. Any best practices that you have there?
- [13:16]
C
Yes, definitely. I think we'll often see this starts with the C Suite as a priority for the organization. I think someone wisely said if it's not owned at the C Suite, it's not really a strategy in some capacity. And so with that comes setting a vision for academic communities. And it comes with setting a tone for how the workforce will be treated. And then, of course, there's a whole array of things that follow that. Organizational design, maybe some policies. There's roles and responsibilities that come as a result of who's going to take on which students, what's the workflow going to look like. And then only later after that are we going to talk about how you would actually then implement a technology solution. Again, Jessica and I were in a position where we were able to kind of go slow, to go fast and focused really on how do you think about what that leadership narrative is, what KPI's matter, what are we measuring. And then we go and build and structure the platform so that the, the usability is there for the end users because that's of utmost importance as well because they're the ones creating the very high quality and trustworthy data that then kind of rolls back up to that report. And so we're kind of in that world. I think all of us hear that most days that it's an and universe, not an or universe. And so again, I think we think of leaders being really engaged, really reportable, clear metrics and a really good user experience are the kind of key there's so helpful.
- [14:49]
A
And Jessica, I know you've collaborated closely with Katrina for some years now. So from your point of view, what do you see tends to change once these, some of these challenges that we've discussed are addressed more intentionally with this kind of integrated and technology based approach to learning.
- [15:06]
B
You know, that's a, it's a really great, I think once once technology really becomes kind of that platform that we can start to see when we, we see it then as an enabler. Right. So technology for the sake of technology isn't the value. Right. It becomes the ability to make really informed decisions. We get the opportunity then to say how can we do better? How do we partner more intentionally? How do we identify best practices? How do we ensure that we're supporting our preceptors? How are we ensuring that we're having best in class working and learning environments? How do we know that we have the right learner at the right time? And having bedside ready or we're producing folks who are really want to stay within our communities to practice that we're encouraging that professional identity of our learners, that we know that they're ready to be in practice when they graduate, that they have these, the outcomes that we're looking for, that we're building the pipeline of the future. So it gives us that ability to make those decisions from an informed position. But we're also creating that experience that our learners want, that our preceptors want, but that our leaders have the ability to know that we're doing this, that we have that replication, but that we can with confidence make these decisions that in the past we haven't been able to do. But I think even more importantly, it allows these partnerships that have been historically there for years upon years upon years to be able to say we know that we're making the right decisions as partners in this journey together to create what we know we need, which is a strong workforce of the future.
- [16:45]
A
Well, thank you, Jessica and I want to thank you both for everything that you've shared so far on clinical education and how this ties into workforce strategy. It's such an important element of building the future clinical workforce, as you've both noted. But before we conclude our time together today, I wanted to make sure there was anything perhaps that we didn't touch on until to give you both space to mention any parting advice or even common pitfalls that you might highlight for leaders as they think about the future of clinical education, workforce planning and academic partnerships.
- [17:20]
C
Yeah, I can start. I think one of the things that we've had the privilege of seeing health systems and states and regional communities solve this problem, and I think one of the things that is the key to success is going about it together. And as a community with the student experience at the center of that. We know that in practice, health systems are competing, but in education, we're all competing to have the best quality care available for ourselves and those that we love. And so I think that shared mission allows for there to be multi year gains for those community goals, the workforce, those systems ultimately benefit. And again, I think most importantly, everything that we're doing in this space is for patients and the quality of care that they're going to receive one day. So I think keeping that bigger picture North Star in mind helps to get through some of the harder parts that inevitably pop up when you're navigating. Getting on the same page, keeping that
- [18:27]
A
North Star in mind, such an important reminder. Thanks, Katrina.
- [18:31]
C
Yeah.
- [18:31]
A
And Jessica, what would you add?
- [18:33]
B
Yeah, you know, Katrina, I think you're. That's spot on. I mean, the opportunities in front of us is truly the ability to align around how to do this better together. And so I think you summed it up exactly. How do we get started with creating those high quality and appropriate learning environments? It's really hard to understand what's the right learner, the right time, and knowing that we have operational realities, that's the other thing that I think we certainly want to ensure that the ability to make sure that we understand we have the pressure points that are always going to be here in the health care space. The clinical environments are not going to get any easier in these days. So how do we ensure that we understand how many learners are the right learners? What does it mean to be a preceptor in the environment? And what's that right sweet spot? How many learners are at the right time at the right space and get the right experiences at the right time? We can do that together, and that's kind of getting that started at the right space because that's creating the best in class learning environments at the same time. So that's an opportunity for us to collectively go at this together.
- [19:48]
A
Well, Jessica, Katrina, it's been such a pleasure talking to you both, and your passion for this work really came through so clearly throughout our conversation today. So I just want to thank you for your time and for sharing that with listeners and for all of the great insights that you're leaving them with.
- [20:03]
C
Thank you for having us.
- [20:05]
B
Yes. Thank you. Yeah.
- [20:07]
A
And we also want to thank our podcast sponsor for today, ECG Management Consultants. Listeners, be sure to tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page@beckershospitalreview.com.