When Joon Lee, MD, took over as CEO of Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare in July 2023, he identified the workforce as a major area for improvement. He wanted to reduce reliance on contract labor and improve employee turnover rates.
His executive leadership team deployed multiple tactics to achieve their goals, including giving raises to nearly all employees. The health system invested $150 million to bump up salaries for 20,000 of the system's 25,000 employees at a time when other health systems were cutting executive pay and conducting layoffs.
The results?
Emory reduced contract nurses to less than 300 nurses, down from 1,370 in March of 2023, and improved staff turnover to below 2019 levels.
"We made a lot of different investments in the workforce in terms of concentrating on benefits and pay, and we committed to making ourselves a market leader in terms of pay for the frontline workers concentrating with nurses, and throughout including MAs, the environmental service, as well as technicians and technologists that are part of our workforce," said Dr. Lee during an interview for the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast," noting, "We are very proud of the fact that we've made significant improvements in terms of turnover."
Dr. Lee said the $150 million investment in raising employee pay delivered intended results and occurred simultaneously with a broader financial turnaround. It helped drive down the use of contract labor quickly and significantly. When Dr. Lee joined the system, contract labor accounted for in the mid-20% range of all nurses; now it's below 15%.
"We're still not where we want to be, but it's actually below the pre-pandemic rate of what we saw in 2019," he said. "But even beyond that, altogether it's a bit harder to quantify, but we think that has had a significant impact in terms of the culture."
Dr. Lee believes keeping nurses, MAs and technicians long-term, who build their careers at Emory, produces a more engaged workforce and provides the ability to institute a functioning and collaborative system between different business units.
Increasing employee pay helped achieve Emory's goals, but it wasn't the only factor. Dr. Lee said the second component to the system's quick transformation was creating a high performance leadership team with increased agility and functioning more as a system.
The 'systemness' approach benefitted Emory last year after three vendor-related incidents challenged the system. Emory was affected by the Change Healthcare hack in February and Microsoft outage caused by CrowdStrike in July. The health system also felt the effects of an IV shortage after the Bayer plant was destroyed by a hurricane in September. The health system was able to weather all the challenges with minimal impact on patient care and throughput.
"I take it as a testament to what our leadership team has been able to do, being agile and functioning much more and leveraging the power of having a system instead of a single hospital," said Dr. Lee. "With these pillars in mind, we've had significant improvement in terms of our financials."