It is universally understood that the healthcare industry is rising at a rapid rate with no real plateauing or declining in the foreseeable future. Services continue to drive demand as technology advances, research improves, and people seek to live longer, healthier lives. This continued strain on the healthcare industry means more and more clinics pop up all over the United States hoping to address this growing demand at market equilibrium.
While this has led to significant price increases – Americans are spending nearly $15,000 per capita a year on healthcare – it also means that clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations are struggling to both fill and retain top talent. While the everyday bustle of the clinic is chaotic enough, the HR challenges in the healthcare industry add another layer of unwanted burden to the system.
Here are the top challenges in human resources that your industry may be facing.
1. Advancing Technology
Advancing technology-based segment costs in healthcare are projected to rise at a faster rate than any other in the industry. While robotics has significantly reduced the toll on physicians and increased surgical and therapeutic successes, the rapid influx of generative AI and the need for data and analytics opens a whole new door for hospitals and staff.
Whether this means that your clinic now must hire new roles to track these new metrics and growing technologies, or your staff must adapt and learn to something unfamiliar (in between the growing patient caseload, no doubt), it adds a significant stress to your already burdensome operations.
2. Training
To segue from our discussion about advancing technology, clinical staff must be trained on not only this rising tech, but they have special certifications and training required to operate under a license. As a manager, you are probably all-too familiar with that one doctor, nurse, or provider who forgot to renew that specific certification or did not log in to begin the training modules. This scenario isn’t just exclusive to your clinic; it’s proliferous across all healthcare organizations.
Healthcare providers are constantly under stress to manage and maintain patient loads. While it is easy to blame the staff members for not completing training, realistically their priorities are with their patients. However, training must still be done. With an HR outsourcing partner in the healthcare industry like Corban OneSource, we help you track, manage, and maintain all training and certifications for your staff.
3. Retention
Just about every industry faces retention issues, but it is a true elephant in the room for the healthcare industry. Shortages in skilled, certified staff can be found in every nook and cranny across healthcare facilities, as different clinics work to poach workers from competitors to fill these vacant holes. While pay may be a factor in most cases – not necessarily because of dissatisfaction, but rather the competitor is waving a few dollars more – there are many other reasons a healthcare worker may leave one role for another.
Among these factors include age and gender, working conditions, and work relationships. If the team is missing general camaraderie, mutual respect, and proper leadership, the door opens for employees to go elsewhere. Interestingly enough, if your clinic does not have adequate staffing levels, then healthcare employees will also seek to move elsewhere – a true paradox for your HR Department to solve.
4. Scheduling
Depending on the services your clinic provides, you may run into difficulty writing the weekly schedules for your staff. Your clinic might demand 24-hour staffing, condensed work weeks, and emergency or on-call coverage. To further add complications, nursing unions, such as SEIU, will bargain for limitations on scheduling, giving you extra footwork to ensure adequate staffing is scheduled while respecting the boundaries the union demands.
These challenges alone are stressful, but now the additional task of ensuring punches are accurate tosses another wrench in the work. Payroll processing must be accurate; the Fair Labor Standards Act must be followed; union demands must be met. Even if an employee is salaried, there are still considerations regarding hours worked. When you outsource your healthcare HR to a reputable HR outsourcing company, it can help manage these issues with services like managed payroll.
5. Patient Satisfaction
It might be easy to get wrapped up in the idea that the HR Department solely focuses on the people who work at the clinic. If you are reading this, you probably already understand that is simply not true. The “human” in Human Resources accounts for just about every individual who steps foot into the building or interacts with the organization. For a clinic to be successful, the patients must be satisfied. This goes from ensuring patients have easy
access to the healthcare facility (think Americans with Disabilities Act) to providers successfully addressing and treating all of the patients’ concerns.
6. Discipline and Adverse Actions
Here is the one we don’t always want to face but are always responsible for handling. Sometimes employees act out and the situation needs to be confronted. It may be a bad day (we all have those), or declining happiness and satisfaction working at the clinic, and anything in between. These are issues we hope never arise, but they ostensibly will, and it is up to the HR Department to handle. While direct managers may handle the initial outburst, the HR manager always has to clean up the spill – whether it be adverse action letters, termination, or even lawsuits.
7. Compliance
As a healthcare provider, you understand the absolute necessity for following the law, especially in the case of HIPAA or other healthcare-related acts and laws. There is a large volume of regulation that must be followed in human resources as well, and a lot of it includes the handling of tedious paperwork and tracking what your staff is doing. Without the proper paperwork, handbooks, or signage, your clinic risks facing steep penalties and fines, or having no recourse for adverse actions.
For example, if a certain action detrimental to the job is not addressed in the employee handbook, then that action cannot be disciplined. Employees engaging in this behavior might be distracted or cause interpersonal conflicts with coworkers, leading to low morale and creating a slippery slope to a vast array of other problems. It pays to be prudent in the human resources department.
How are other Healthcare Providers solving for these challenges?
They are focusing on the core drivers to patient care along with training and development of their staff, i.e. Recruiting and Development. They are looking at the least strategic and most time-consuming aspects of HR and partnering with an HR Services Provider that can not only take that off their plate but as a value add, deliver those services better than their internal HR team was. Healthcare organizations are using Jack Welch’s (former CEO of GE) strategy which is “Making their back office someone else’s front office.” HR Outsourcing allows healthcare organizations to move the needle in two ways: (1) Focus on driving patient care (2) Increase employee satisfaction by letting a trusted HR Business Partner do the day to day HR Compliance, Payroll and Benefits Administration
At Corban OneSource, we have over 29 years in Human Resources Outsourcing and have provided services for clients across 22 different industries, the healthcare industry among them. We work with businesses that have between 75 to 6,000 employees and our teams are entirely based in the United States. Please contact us to learn more about HR Outsourcing and how we can help your healthcare organization!
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