In the current healthcare environment, health system executives face a critical imperative: unlocking objective insights from clinician data to address workforce and efficiency challenges effectively. Despite acknowledging the importance of holistic, actionable data, many struggle with incomplete and cumbersome data systems.
This urgency is compounded by the precarious state of the healthcare workforce, marked by high rates of turnover, attrition, and burnout. Hospital CEOs rank personnel shortages as a top concern, with 78% of physicians reporting burnout and 46% considering career changes. Financial losses due to burnout average $9,320 per physician per workday, with a projected shortage of 124,000 physicians looming by 2034.
To navigate these challenges, executives can employ five guiding principles:
- Align on the big picture. Navigating competing priorities and workforce challenges makes it hard to integrate diverse data for informed decision-making on broader workforce strategies like recruitment and retention. Internal collaboration is crucial in unifying siloed data sources, while partnering with industry allies provides access to market data for strategic alignment across health system leaders.
- Address ‘what’s in it for me’ to establish trust. Health systems must build trust among clinicians and employees to leverage data’s full impact. Early, consistent inclusion in data discussions, especially those affecting processes and workflows, is vital. Draw a clear line illustrating ‘what’s in it for me’ for key stakeholders.
- Provide leaders with accessible, actionable data that delivers value. Setting a data-driven workforce strategy is only as successful as the leaders who can help execute it. But frontline leaders are already overwhelmed by their day-to-day roles and are unlikely to search for data to help them do their jobs better or more efficiently. Bringing together data sources into role-based dashboards or easy-to-access views is a critical first step, but the data must also be actionable and prescriptive to optimize the value.
- Invest in data and capabilities that support flexible, personalized solutions. Meeting the demands for flexibility and personalization in healthcare requires sophisticated predictive data analytics, including AI capabilities, to anticipate and address diverse needs. However, despite access to abundant data, much of it remains retrospective, hindering forward planning. Specifically, health systems face challenges in accessing quality data on clinician market supply, seasonal volume fluctuations, and attrition, which are crucial for attracting and retaining care team members.
- Define ROI and measure success. Given ongoing margin pressures, near-term, concrete ROI is critical when investing in any solution. When it comes to workforce investments, it can be difficult to measure – or agree upon the type of ROI required to get broader buy-in. To create a compelling business case, consider how to measure avoided costs (e.g., retention, upskilling) and make outcomes such as optimizing clinician time concretely and tied to business goals.
Partnership in action
As a part of its workforce transformation across 10 hospitals and more than 300 care locations, MedStar integrated Axuall’s clinical workforce intelligence solutions into its next-generation clinician planning, recruiting, and onboarding process, yielding impressive initial results:
- 21-day reduction in onboarding
- 9 out of 10 clinician satisfaction score
Built with leading healthcare systems, Axuall is a workforce intelligence company powered by a national real-time practitioner data network. The technology enables healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth, and health plans to dramatically reduce onboarding and enrollment time while providing robust data insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting. To learn more, visit axuall.com or follow Axuall on LinkedIn.