To keep pace with a rapidly evolving health care environment, many hospitals and health systems are investing in innovative technology solutions to help address critical workforce and operational needs. For health systems and academic institutions looking to co-manage student placements and clinical rotations more effectively, it is important to thoughtfully evaluate the needs of your organization and weigh them objectively as you assess available software solutions to manage all clinical learners in one place, increase administrative productivity and realize cost savings.
Initially, an organization should:
- Build a list of requirements and understand how they are aligned with your objectives.
- Rate those requirements in order of importance to indicate which ones are most critical.
- Create a Request for Information that can be sent to vendors and rank responses against your established requirements.1
*If a purchased solution meets 80% of requirements or greater, then opting to buy is advisable.
Additionally, consider the following 5 questions to help determine how your organization should move forward.
1. How can clinician education software benefit my organization?
Clinical education software allows you to manage every aspect of your clinical rotation operations – onboarding, scheduling, evaluations and more – all from one centralized platform. By automating burdensome administrative tasks related to these functions, your organization can save valuable time and resources while also enabling administrators, students and faculty to focus on more engaging and critical work.
Health care settings can develop a more robust staffing pipeline – which is critical amidst ongoing health care workforce shortages – by posting and sharing clinical experience opportunities, managing the clinical working environment, and collaborating with students and schools to train your future workforce.
Academic institutions can connect with affiliated sites to monitor student progress toward completion of clinical requirements. Furthermore, it provides valuable data and insights to inform workforce decisions. It empowers clinical sites to focus on the quality of the clinical learning environment that impacts the confidence and competence of the clinical workforce.
2. Do we plan to grow significantly?
Scalability is paramount in an ever-changing health care landscape. Many cloud-based solutions enable the ability to grow and evolve in step with changing organizational, market and regulatory requirements. Manual processes – often prone to errors and inconsistencies – are not suited to organizations looking to grow and thrive in such a complex operating environment. Implementing an innovative new technology platform can facilitate the change needed to streamline your organization’s clinical education and placement management functions.
3. Will we get a return on the investment?
When considering the return on investment your organization may get from purchasing a software solution to streamline the clinician education management process, it’s important to focus on some of the more practical benefits of implementation.
Securing clinical education opportunities for students is important work that is often bogged down by complicated manual processes. Managing this process via spreadsheets, physical paper copies and other outdated tools is inefficient and burdensome for administrators and students alike.
In addition to solving for manual errors and reducing the risk of critical mistakes, the automation of labor-intensive tasks like these allows for greater focus on high-value work – like training future clinicians. Amidst ongoing workforce shortages, developing and managing a strong pipeline of students and clinicians can help to ensure continuity of care and aid in critical recruitment and retention efforts down the line.
A recent survey of 280 US companies found that 62% of business owners have identified three or more major inefficiencies in their manual business processes that could be resolved with automation.2
4. When is the right time to implement a software solution?
With the ultimate goal of delivering best-in-class patient care, health care organizations must equip themselves with the critical technology tools and data necessary to operate at peak performance.
As turnover, burnout and clinical workforce shortages continue to disrupt recruitment and retention efforts, effectively educating, training and credentialing future clinicians to ensure a sustainable pipeline of talent is critical.
If your organization is struggling to do this, there is no time like the present to start considering your options. Adopting a tried-and-true software solution to help automate this process – saving valuable time and resources – may be the way forward.
Moreover, it’s never a bad time to reevaluate current processes and systems to assess whether they still align with best practices, enable effective workflows, and maximize your team’s productivity. If not currently in a position to buy and implement software, equipping your organization with the right information and insights now can lead to more informed decision-making down the line.
5. Is it important to choose an industry-specific solution?
Properly educating and training medical, nursing and allied health students is critical work – and providing them with access to clinical rotations and placement opportunities is one of the most important steps in their journey to becoming medical professionals. Health care organizations should select an industry-specific software solution that understands and addresses the complexities of managing the clinical education process. This includes knowledge and expertise in affiliation agreements, compliance concerns, HIPAA security requirements and more.