Staffing at health care providers, especially for IT, is being challenged on many fronts. Inflation is up while Medicaid has been significantly cut. New technologies such as AI call for new types of staffing with new skills, which are rare and in high demand. Scarce staff are being won away by competing institutions.
This video covers key issues in finding staff, including the use of what Ray Lowe, Senior Vice President and CIO at AltaMed, calls the “digital workforce” of chatbots, etc. Lowe shares the stage with Bill Grana, CEO at IT services provider HCTec, which is used by AltaMed to help optimize staffing.
A large part of the video examines the choice between in-house hiring, the use of contractors, and seeking out services or partners. Lowe points out that outsourcing means managing service-level agreements (SLAs) instead of having direct control and ensuring that one’s staff conform to your mission. The outsourcing partner must take action if a contract employee is not fulfilling their role. He also shares some insights related to Grana’s article on 10 healthcare IT system staffing traps.
Grana makes a distinction between “core work,” which lies at the heart of your strategy, and “context work” that can include project-based or initiative-base work. If a contract person has been working in a core operational role for years, it’s time to hire staff to do it. But “context work” might also include EHR management and application management, infrastructure, or an IT call center. One of the best ways to know how you’re doing with your staffing is to do a health IT staffing audit.
Lowe and Grana also devote considerable time to the tech revolution. Lowe calls the past 5 years “one of the fastest-moving times” in health care technology, while Grana calls the period “10 times more exciting” than the first dot-com explosion. Lowe praises companies such as HCTec for helping to provide a “stable foundation.”
Lowe speaks of the need for a “nimble CIO” who can keep up the promise of technology, while also being cautious. Business cases must drive adoption. Grana says that the role of the CIO has shifted over just three or four years from a tactical one of taking care of infrastructure to a more strategic one of delivering on the organization’s mission.
Lowe explains how his department queries LLMs to write initial plans, which are reviewed by humans. Ambient voice can create visit notes to make the doctor more efficient and give more time for bonding with patients. In cybersecurity, a device can identify a problem and suggest a solution.
Grana says that labor costs are a significant portion of a CIO’s budget, but that determining the right mix is not just a matter of cost, but also quality and the experience of clinicians as well as patients.
Grana also discusses, “What keeps people from making optimal decisions about labor mix in IT?” as well as other departments. Some of his observations included departments rushing to spend their budgets toward the end of the fiscal year and managers rating their value as proportional to the size of their team. It’s important to ask whether the jobs are getting done: what are the outcomes?
Check out our video interview with Ray Lowe from AltaMed and Bill Grana from HCTec to learn more about optimizing your healthcare workforce.
Learn more about AltaMed: https://www.altamed.org/
Learn more about HCTec: https://hctec.com/
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