The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has changed the demand for healthcare professionals and the opportunities they have, as well as healthcare organizations hiring and staffing practices, according to a new whitepaper from The Execu|Search Group.
The Execu|Search Group is a recruitment and staffing firm based in New York City.
The whitepaper highlights a number of distinct trends that have emerged following two PPACA enrollment periods. It also analyzes the effect of those trends on both medical professionals and the staffing and hiring practices of healthcare organizations.
Listed below are five trends indentified in the whitepaper.
- Inpatient care shifts to ambulatory/outpatient care. Since 2012, the number of healthcare clients that offer outpatient care has increased by 65 percent and hospital clients that run outpatient care centers have increased by 49 percent. The trend has resulted in a high demand for care providers and non-clinical personnel to staff the growing number of outpatient care centers.
- Nurse practitioner and physician assistant roles rise. Increasingly, many healthcare organizations have begun to focus on a new model of team-based care that focuses more heavily on employing NPs and PAs to provide primary care to aging populations.
- Managed long-term care organizations grow rapidly. PPACA initiatives to prevent hospital readmissions have spurred an impressive growth in MLTC organizations that help reduce patient load in hospitals and increase the demand for professionals who specialize in MLTC.
- Importance of temporary staffing increases. The demand for healthcare professionals has led to an increase in the number of temporary job orders from healthcare clients of 39 percent year-over-year from 2013 to 2014.
- Tech-savvy employees become the focus of demand. Health IT mandates and EHR adoption have promoted the use of health IT across the industry to improve care quality, achieve better outcomes and lower costs, thus increasing the demand for tech-savvy professionals.