Workforce has been a big challenge for the entire healthcare industry and Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health has developed creative solutions to build a stronger foundation for the future.
The health system has a 66,000-person workforce sprawled across both urban and rural areas where teammates are looking for growth and advancement. Executive leaders are focused on simplicity to rebuild jobs and transform the workforce structure.
"When you think of the current workforce challenges, we are partnering with more and more schools, educational organizations to help our caregivers advance, to help bring in folks that are being trained in healthcare related fields, and also to encourage people to go into those career paths," said Rob Allen, Intermountain's CEO, during an episode of the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast." "When I look at our workforce, 66,000 people and many of them want to advance. They want an opportunity to grow, and at Intermountain, we want to help them."
The health system has had a traditional tuition reimbursement program for many years, and Mr. Allen wanted to take it up a notch. His team rolled out a "peak program" giving caregivers access to $5,200 per year to use for education instead of reimbursing them after they earned the degree.
Intermountain also works with local universities on debt-free degrees for caregivers who are able to work through their degree programs on resources from Intermountain so they don't have any debt upon graduation.
"It's all been paid for through the Intermountain program, and on top of that, we think about how do we foster the next generation? As a caregiver, if I'm not going to use my $5,200, I can gift it to a family member," said Mr. Allen. "We have between 500 to 600 people already who've gifted it to a family member and we hope those family members, many of them will choose healthcare and come be a part of Intermountain Health as they build their pathway to their career."
Intermountain also invests in internal advancement by fostering an environment of continued improvement and innovation. Since 2017, caregivers have generated and implemented more than 400,000 improvement ideas.
"At Intermountain, I like to say we've never seen a project, an idea, we didn't like and we'd never seen one we didn't want to do ourselves," said Mr. Allen. "So there's a lot of this insular work that's gone on in many cases, but in the world today, we have to partner. The mindset for me is partnership. How are we partnering first with our caregivers?"
Intermountain's leadership team has intentionally built structures to give clinicians the freedom to identify needs and opportunities, and then lead the change systemwide.