Recently I came across an online article that struck a cord with me.  The article, “5 Hospital and Health System CEOs: What ‘Top Performance’ Looks Like to Me” was posted by Becker’s Hospital Review.

In this article five healthcare CEOs discuss what “top performance” is and how their organizations are working towards that goal.  The CEOs were asked about “top performance” in five areas within healthcare: clinical quality, finance, patient satisfaction, employee/ physician morale, and leadership.

While reading this article, what resonated with me was how the Prophecy Assessments would assist with “top performance” on each of the five areas discussed.

Clinical Quality

Clinical quality starts with quality staff.  Making sure your clinicians have the necessary clinical knowledge to provide safe and effective patient care is paramount to hospitals.  But, what about those clinicians who could use some clinical remediation?

The Prophecy Assessments not only indentify clinicians that have the clinical knowledge needed, but also assist in creating customized remediation plans based upon a nurse’s unique learning style and personality.  This will help to ensure your entire clinical workforce will provide that excellent care your organization strives for.

Finance

Prophecy will directly improve the bottom line, by reducing turnover costs for hospitals.  Once you start to hire only the nurses that are identified as “top performers” not only will clinical quality improve, but so will retention.

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example.  If a hospital has 200 nurses and 14% turnover (national average), each year that hospital would lose 28 nurses.  If we use some industry standards for turnover costs each of those nurses will cost that hospital between $22k and $64k per nurse. (OJIN, 2007)  To make the math easy we will assume the turnover costs for each nurse is $30k.  Twenty-eight nurses at $30k per nurse will cost that organization $840k every year.

One of the clients that has already adopted Prophecy was able to reduce their nurse turnover to just 5% last year.  Let’s take another look at the scenario from the previous example, but change the turnover rate to reflect using Prophecy to pre-screen your clinicians.  With 200 nurses in your workforce, but just a 5% turnover rate you would lose 10 nurses each year.  With turnover costs at $30k per nurse a hospital this turnover would only cost a hospital $300k.  That would free up over half a million dollars normally being spent on turnover costs.  Imagine where a chunk of money like that could be used in your hospital!

Patient satisfaction

“Patient Satisfaction is the ‘other side of the coin’ for quality. Doing the right things clinically is a start, but if we don’t do it the right way or with a caring attitude, then we’ve not served the patient well.”
Ted Townsend, president and CEO of St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.[1]

Not only will the Prophecy Assessments ensure that your clinicians can provide quality care by gauging their clinical knowledge.  Prophecy will also identify if a caregiver has the particular set of “soft skills” needed to interact with patients (and employees) in a positive manner that would improve patient satisfaction.  By identifying and only bringing aboard those nurses with the necessary “soft skills”, you can rest assured that the interactions the patients have with that staff will result in a positive experience.

Employee and physician morale

One CEO noted that he believes employees are attracted to hospitals that have great reputations for high clinical quality.[2]  While using Prophecy to improve your clinical workforce and clinical outcomes clinical reputation may result in attracting more “top performers” to apply.  Once they have applied, you will still need to ensure the ability to identify those “top performing” applicants.  Prophecy’s Job and Employer Engagement section allows you to easily identify those clinicians that are engaged to the nursing field, and also to your hospital.  Nurses that are more engaged in what they are doing tend to be happier employees.  While not always the case, a happier employee is more likely, when interacting with patients, to leave a good impression of the hospital with that patient.

Leadership

Are great leaders born that way or developed? Both! There are three main pieces that contribute to leadership success:

1)    Skills & Experience,

2)    Attitudes & Motivation

3)    Personality & Learning Style

Prophecy captures this information through our Behavioral assessment, and can pinpoint which nurses already have those raw talents correlated to successful leadership. From decision-making to problem solving, this report assists with training and motivation, to develop those existing talents and grow the future leaders of your organization.

With the recent changes to healthcare, “top performance” is becoming more and more important for hospitals to identify and develop within their ranks.  If you would like to learn more about how the Prophecy Assessment will assist with your “top performance” initiatives feel free to reach out to a Prophecy representative today.

David McParland

dmcparland@prophecyhealth.com

877-773-4473, ext. 700