Workforce

Health information exchange. It creates a free-flow of clinical information between IT systems, enhancing patient care and connecting hospitals that have different EHRs. And for CFOs and CIOs, it can lead to big revenue returns.

With an increasing demand for home care services, home care businesses have been springing up in communities across the country. And with the rapid expansion of these largely unregulated businesses questions about the industry's hiring practices have begun to surface.

Healthcare employees have a decreased confidence in the U.S. economy as a whole but feel optimistic about their personal employment prospects, according to the recently released Randstad Healthcare Employee Confidence Index.

Proponents of lean management argue that whether or not healthcare providers realize it yet, there is a major demand within their organizations for the model because, they will tell you, lean improves patient safety and reimbursement rates, and creates new standards around transparency. But getting healthcare organizations on the lean bandwagon takes leadership.

Healthcare organizations are being more proactive in the prevention of burnout among their staff. After all, it's within a provider's best interest to keep expenses down around the well-being of their employees. "If employees leave a company, there's a cost to advertise and recruit. Providers lose out every single day there's an empty position," explained Tricia Pattee, product director with HEALTHeCAREERS, an online resource for both recruitment and job searches within the healthcare industry.

North Shore-LIJ Health System in metropolitan New York expects to save $8 million by sharpening its focus on labor. Jim Bosco, vice president of corporate human resources at the health system, recently discussed the benefits of its new workforce management technology with Healthcare Finance News Editor Rene Letourneau.

There's a tremendous amount of waste occurring in the healthcare industry. Organizations are moving to lean management because it exposes what and where these wastes are and rethinks the way work is done via value streams. Healthcare Finance News talked to a lean management expert to take a look at how waste impacts organizations.

Despite all the innovations in the healthcare industry, the sad truth is that errors with wrongly prescribed medication are happening more than ever. Not only can this be costly for healthcare organizations, it can also have tragic consequences.

Respondents to a 2011 AMN Healthcare survey indicate that healthcare professions are increasingly taking advantage of social media and mobile devices for job searching purposes and shifting away from some traditional job search methods.

At the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s ANI conference in Las Vegas in late June, I had the pleasure of attending a keynote speech given by Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed a plane on the Hudson River in January 2009, saving the lives of the 155 people on board.