Overview
As healthcare continues to move from a volume to value model, organizations are re-evaluating their
workforce strategies to ensure they address gaps that may impact performance for a number of key
outcomes. This tool can help you evaluate whether your organization has gaps between your workforce
capabilities and the priorities of your strategy.
Workforce Strategy Assessment
1. Prioritizing Strategic Focus Areas
Every healthcare organization faces unique circumstances that shape its strategic priorities. As you think about the key challenges your organization has identified in your workforce management strategy, rate the importance of the following:
- Labor cost containment
- Throughput and capacity management
- Patient engagement
- Compliance, such as regulatory and union compliance
- Staff engagement, including turnover and retention
- Clinical outcomes, such as length of stay and readmissions
- Patient safety, such as hospital-acquired infections and falls
2. Evaluate Past Performance
Every healthcare organization faces unique circumstances that shape its strategic priorities. As you think about the key challenges your organization has identified in your workforce management strategy, rate the importance of the following:
- Labor cost containment
- Throughput and capacity management
- Patient engagement
- Compliance, such as regulatory and union compliance
- Staff engagement, including turnover and retention
- Clinical outcomes, such as length of stay and readmissions
- Patient safety, such as hospital-acquired infections and falls
3. Organizational Capability
Your organization’s strategic workforce plan should address its top priorities to measurably impact outcomes, but success depends on your organization’s ability to achieve your goals. Rate the organization’s capability to achieve its goals in the following areas:
- Labor cost containment
- Throughput and capacity management
- Patient engagement
- Compliance, such as regulatory and union compliance
- Staff engagement, including turnover and retention
- Clinical outcomes, such as length of stay and readmissions
- Patient safety, such as hospital-acquired infections and falls
4. Identify the Gaps
In this section, we’ll help you identify gaps between your past performance and capability and your plan’s priority. Take your ratings from sections 1-3 to complete the formulas.
5. Visualize the Gaps
Plotting the gaps on a radar chart can help you see exactly where your organization should place extra focus. Start by using your priority score for each of the seven strategic focus areas. Then, plot your PP+C score for each focus area. Shade the area between the two to help you visualize the gap.
6. Evaluate the Gaps
Now that you’ve charted your ratings on past performance, prioritization, and organizational capability, you may be seeing some gaps. Here are some additional questions to help you evaluate the gaps in your workforce strategy.
- Where do significant gaps exist between your past performance, capability, and prioritization?
- Why do these gaps exist?
- If you don’t address these gaps, how will a continuation of the status quo hinder your organization’s achievement of other priorities?
- What changes need to be made to achieve your priority workforce goals?
- How will you use your data to monitor your progress toward your priorities and measure the success of your plan?
7. Turn Workforce Data into Balanced Outcomes
Balanced Outcomes symplr Workforce provides integrated, healthcare-specific workforce management solutions and services that empower healthcare organizations to use staff, patient, and operational data to drive improvements in five key areas: clinical outcomes, financial outcomes, staff engagement, patient satisfaction, and compliance.
